Working from home is the new norm, with most employees embracing remote work. Flexible work models have plenty of benefits for both employees and companies while having little to no negative impact on productivity levels. However, distributed teams have their own challenges. Managers must adapt to workers in different time zones, implement asynchronous communication, and ensure remote workers are still engaged.
Hybrid collaboration is complex. It’s not just about “in the office” or “not in the office” — it’s also about leadership, connection, creativity, and the technology that enables your teams to adapt. Over 77% of companies have adopted a hybrid work model, but how can executive leadership optimize it for their teams? Here’s some of the lessons we’ve learned to help leaders cultivate hybrid collaboration.
In business, meetings can feel like wasted time more often than not. It’s true that no team gets anywhere without a collaborative spirit and tight lines of communication. But there’s a reason for the saying, “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Trying to engage everyone in everything with no process and structure for doing so can lead to stagnation.
In an ever-evolving marketplace, companies have to constantly innovate new products or update existing ones to satisfy customers. A stagnant product line can lead to customers choosing newer or better products from competitors. Ideas drive innovation. But leaders have a tough time sorting through the hundreds of ideas from different concepts, teams, and products. Categorizing and prioritizing these ideas can help teams focus on the innovations with the highest potential for success.
As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Whether you’re a lumberjack or not, there’s a powerful truth to Lincoln’s wise words. And that’s the importance of planning. Coming up with a solid strategic plan is a crucial aspect of any business. How can you expect to achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you’re aiming for?
To meet the challenges of the future, businesses have to stay agile. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that in 2020—one of the most challenging years on record—businesses with agile practices outperformed non-agile teams on almost every dimension that matters. Agile organizations saw greater customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance than their competitors.
Our mission to empower teams to unlock new ways of collaborating motivates us every day to invent powerful-yet-simple tools. This month, we released features and updates to help you keep your projects on track and your workflows united, with fresh frameworks, a new shape pack, improved integrations, and more. To see how Miro’s newest innovations can help your team work better together, check out our roundup of releases from June.
As we shift into a new world of hybrid work another glaring trend is emerging: the workforce is more divided than ever. Today, people work in silos, ideas get lost in separate tools, and isolated teams lead to disengagement, work waste, and slowed progress. Among employees who self-identify as disengaged, 75% are actively looking for new work. The reality is, we have a digital economy, which requires a new way of working that is digital first, multi-team and multi-location.
Product development teams are constantly looking for ways to focus their time and energy on building products and reducing time spent on alignment and documentation. But oftentimes it’s too easy for complexity and tool overload to get in the way of progress – driving decreased product quality, disconnection, and delayed time-to-market. That’s why it’s so important for teams to use tools that unlock free-flowing creativity and innovation instead of inhibiting it.
