Three Principles to Support Effective "Back to the Office" Hybrid Teams

This is the November 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Is your “hybrid” team working? So far, most of my clients say, “No!” Managers think there's not enough collaboration. Team members discover their meetings don't work because the office is not sufficiently equipped with the necessary meeting tools.

As a result, managers want everyone back in the office. They think the office will support better collaboration. While that's possible, it's not likely. That's because most office team members are not collocated. Instead, they are distributed. (See the Allen Curve in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid).)

While people might be back in the buildings, each team needs to assess where everyone is.

Where Are the People?

The image above shows the reality of one “back to the office team.” Everyone has a desk in the same building. But people are distributed across floors and across the expanse of the various floors. Everyone who's back in the office competes for the same few conference rooms so they can collaborate.

Worse, even when they are “back” in the office, some people are not literally in this office. Here's where they are today:

Persons 1 and 3 sit together on Floor 1. They are collocated.
Person 2 is sick and is working from home. Normally, they are Floor 2.
Person 4 is on Floor 2.
Person 5 in on Floor 4.
Person 6 is at a different site, because they have some meetings today. Normally, they are on Floor 3.
Person 7 is at yet a different site, because they are meeting mostly with customers, but have some time to work with the team. Normally, they are on Floor 3 also, but far away from Person 6.
Person 8 has a sick child, so is working from home. Normally, they are on Floor 2.

Can Persons 2 and 8 work a full day? Probably not. But they want to collaborate and contribute as much as possible.

The only collocated people are Persons 1 and 3. Everyone else is too distant to be collocated. This “back in the office” team is actually a hybrid of cluster and satellite teams. (See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for more specifics.)

People need sufficient flexibility about where and when they work for many reasons. Having desks in one building—”back to the office”—is not sufficient for increased collaboration.

Consider these three principles to improve your team's collaboration.

Principle 1: Default to Collaborative Work as a Team

One of the principles in From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams is “Default to collaborative work.” When Mark and I wrote that, we meant collaboration in all aspects of the work:

Planning the next bit of work.
Everything to do with the development of that work: from architecture and design, through code, integration, and test. We didn't care if people paired, swarmed, or mobbed. We just cared that no one worked alone to deliver value.
The demo, retrospective, and any other work after that value delivery.

When teams collaborate, they can release value faster. (For more details, see Flow Metrics and Why They Matter to Teams and Managers.)

When people collaborate, they tend to reduce the WIP. But I'm going to highlight reducing WIP as a specific principle because it's such a challenge for so many people.

Principle 2: Limit the WIP

I saw this stunning statistic on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago: Most people are supposed to work on 15 things on a given day.

Is that 15 number true? I have no idea. When I speak or teach about the portfolio or cycle time, people regularly tell me they are supposed to work on between 5-7 projects at one time. With that many projects, I'm sure people have at least that many tasks.

Multitasking makes everything worse. Here's what we know about the true costs of multitasking:

The more we multitask, the longer it takes us to get into flow in this task. Worse, we often forget essential facts we need to complete this task without errors.
When we forget these facts, we create problems for the future. That often leads to “We have time to do it twice or more times, but not do it right once.”
The more tasks we have, the more delays we create in the system, which increases cycle time.

Everything takes more time and costs more.

On the other hand, a team can specifically limit its WIP and default to collaboration to finish certain items as fast as the team can work. Especially if they collaborate on learning what works for them. That often means the team needs to experiment.

Principle 3: Encourage Team Experimentation

“Back to the office” is a solution to the collaboration problem. It's just one solution—and might be right or wrong.

Managers: Instead of telling teams you want them back to the office, tell them something like this:

“I want to see faster and more frequent delivery of finished features so we can get more customers faster and more revenue from those customers. I know of just one way to do that: collaborate on fewer things. Maybe you see more ways. How can I, as your manager, support you in faster and more frequent delivery of finished features?”

That's a problem teams can address, often with experimentation. That experimentation might be in the form of WIP limits, or changing when and how the team meets. Possibly in how they use their board. But the team needs sufficient autonomy to experiment.

And teams, you can discuss this problem with your managers:

“We want to collaborate to deliver value faster. But we don't have a lot of collaboration time because two people are assigned to other projects. Worse, we can't collaborate in the office because we don't have enough meeting rooms. It's easier to work from home rather than work in the office.”

Now, managers have prepared the team to solve the problem of collaboration.

Delegate the Collaboration Problem to the Team

The more the team has a problem to solve, the more likely they are to experiment and then develop a solution that works. As the team realizes they need more conference rooms, the teams might delegate that problem up to the managers.

That's because effective collaboration requires common space and time. Meetings are not a problem as long as the team completes its work.

Chances are excellent that your “back to the office” teams are hybrid teams of some sort. But too few offices, the physical offices, encourage collaboration. Instead, use these three principles to make collaboration more possible.

This newsletter touches on topics in these books:

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Pragmatic Manager: Vol 21, #11, ISSN: 2164-1196