5 Tips to Master Hybrid Workplace Communication
How to Build Your Internal Communication Strategy
If you’re having difficulty navigating the above challenges, here’s your guide to building an internal communication strategy that works for employees both in the office and at home.
Define the Goal for Your Strategy
Which areas are you struggling the most with? Do you need to streamline your customer service, hand off projects more efficiently, or build a stronger rapport with your team?
You may need to address multiple challenges in your communication strategy, so solutions will vary according to each one.
Find Tools that Work For You
Not every hybrid business needs to have daily Zoom meetings and work on Notion (although we are a big fan of it).
The tools you use to communicate internally will be highly dependent on job role, responsibilities, management, and how your hybrid work model works.
If you’re all in the office multiple times per week, you won’t have the same reliance on virtual meetings as a business that come together once per month.
Before rolling out a new tool to your entire team, research and even try it for yourself. The goal is to make internal communication as easy as possible, rather than present another hurdle.
If you’re unsure of where to start, we kick off our list of top 10 must-have hybrid business tools with Communication Tools. Use our guide to discover what could work best for your business needs.
Make Decisions Based on Who’s in the Office and When
If you’re trying to decide when to hold meetings, kick off projects or sit down with your team, the chances are you’ll want to pick a time and day when the majority of people are in the office.
Desk booking tools such as Officely, offer an overview of who’s booking in and when. You can pull data from previous weeks or look at future bookings to find the most convenient time for everyone.
Visibility around booking into the office is an important part of successfully running a hybrid internal comms strategy; with those insights, you can understand which tools will be most helpful and organize touch points based on office activity.
Beware of Micro-Managing
When you move to a hybrid business model, you should have the same expectations for output and your employees. Often, teams overcompensate for the reduction in in-person contact by increasing meetings, which reduces productivity time for your team.
If you’re entrusting your team to work from home, you need to consider how to compensate for the lower visibility of their work, without making life harder for your employees.
Ensure any new communication tools (such as Slack), or new meetings, are introduced with the goal of maintaining productivity, rather than to micro-manage those not in the office.
Be Open to Feedback
As with any strategy implementation, you need to hear whether it’s working or not from those who use it most. Feedback doesn’t just mean criticism, it also means finding out what is or isn’t working and getting to the bottom of why.
Check in with your colleagues and teammates to ensure they feel they can communicate and collaborate more effectively with the strategy in place.
