How to build and manage a hybrid team

Amazon's drive for hybrid workers to return to the office five days a week has prompted a flurry of headlines. However, the tech giant is not the only company forcing staff back to the office.

Elon Musk has ordered staff at X (formerly Twitter) to work at least 40 hours a week in the office and warned that home work would only be allowed in special circumstances.

Most workers at Walmart's Bentonville headquarters have returned to the office full-time (including those who had to relocate to keep their jobs), while Goldman Sachs has urged employees to do the same.

The pandemic may have bolstered the belief that remote and hybrid work can be successful for many companies.

Yet return-to-office mandates have been a key theme in boardrooms and public debates throughout 2024. Executives are devoting much of their time to convincing or pressuring employees to work in the office more regularly.

This has caused a backlash from staff who work remotely and do not want to lose the improved work-life balance it offers. It has even led to a loss of talent for some companies, especially among female and younger employees.

Against this backdrop, how can managers organise successfully when employees don’t return to the office full-time?

A key success factor for remote and hybrid work during the pandemic was teams’ ability to self-organise. These collaborations were often built on established relationships from prior face-to-face interactions.

An effective alternative to forcing staff to return to the office

Companies such as IBM, Salesforce, and Spotify successfully experimented with remote work and self-organising teams before the pandemic. However, they often reintroduced some elements of hierarchy in the medium term.

So how can managers combine self-organising teams with hybrid work in the long term? In many cases, a command-and-control mindset hampers this type of organisation.

Many researchers and managers have adopted the logic that people are liable to primarily pursue their own objectives.

They assume that individuals will try to get away with working less than their colleagues. Or that employees with specialist knowledge will hold teams to ransom. This could result in staff withholding expertise that is critical to completing a project unless they receive greater awards.

How to lead remote workers more effectively

The traditional take is that organisations must deploy countermeasures to control, monitor, and incentivise appropriate behaviour, with managers policing teams as overseers. This carrot-and-stick method was developed for a world where teams were performing routine tasks in the same place.

Yet our research suggests the significant shift to hybrid working patterns and AI automation requires a new approach.

Conventional management methods are incompatible with the self-organising teams and agile collaboration that today’s organisations need. This is particularly true when employees are working from home.

Instead, we need to unleash the full potential of self-organising teams.

That is why we have developed a new framework, based on lengthy research and experiments. It is underpinned by a concept we call 'virtual bargaining', where individuals think through what each other would do in their head.

Our research shows that people do this naturally in many situations already.

Using virtual bargaining to manage remote employees

Self-organising teams operate within a set of informal, unwritten, and unspoken rules and norms. These govern how members are expected to behave during collaborative tasks.

Team members develop an implicit understanding of these rules over time.

Virtual bargaining provides a practical way of navigating a route to meeting shared objectives.

To work productively, individuals should ask themselves “what should we agree to do here?” having in mind their mutual objectives - rather than “what should I do here.”

Crucially, team members then commit to delivering their side of that imaginary bargain in the belief that other team members will do the same.

This approach implies a different role for the manager. They must provide stability and freedom for teams to perform.

Their role moves away from the old controlling, intervening, and monitoring mentality. This removes the paranoia from managing teams in the hybrid age.

Organisations and managers can promote virtual bargaining and maximise its benefits with these three steps:

1 Build a virtual bargaining team

Our research suggests the more the knowledge and skills of the team members complement one another, the better virtual bargaining works.

Managers can promote complementarity between team members by identifying employees with interrelated skills. They can also facilitate training to cover skills gaps and reduce the dominance of individual team members.

A powerful way to foster this culture is to hire individuals who are instinctive virtual bargainers.

Companies can adapt existing assessment tools to select for traits such as conscientiousness and reasonableness. These characteristics are likely to correlate highly with virtual bargaining.

This will allow managers to populate teams with staff who continually imagine how the team can work better together.

Rampant individualists have little place in a self-organising, de-centralised team.

Involve teams in selecting new members as they are likely to recruit individuals who fit their virtual bargaining ethos.

2 Create an environment for virtual bargaining

Identify, reduce, and eliminate psychological or physical barriers preventing team members from contributing additional effort to the shared objective.

For example, many countries have an increasingly ageing workface. One way to overcome barriers might be to use technology to relieve the physical burden for older workers.

To maximise the productivity gains from virtual bargaining, an individual’s level of contribution to the shared objective should be aligned with both financial and non-financial rewards that they value. Managers should take care that rewards fit with what team members themselves feel is part of a fair social contract.

Managers should also be aware of the risk of destabilising the team by incorrectly identifying and over-rewarding ‘star’ performers.

3 Nurture a culture of virtual bargaining at the team level

Team building exercises need to reinforce a virtual bargaining approach.

Team members should practice co-ordinating on mutually beneficial outcomes, rather than completing exercises that pit them against one another.

For example, form employees into ad-hoc teams with complementary skills. Give them various items and instruct them to achieve a task within a set timeframe.

Managers should be facilitators, influencers, role models, and champions of virtual bargaining. This will establish it as a shared norm for teamwork. Managers should intervene only when autonomous teams become highly dysfunctional.

Much of virtual bargaining is conducted via team members’ sensitivity to one another’s skills and aims. However, good communication will be useful in reinforcing it as a style of reasoning.

Specifically, communication helps build the all-important common understanding of shared objectives. Managers may need to facilitate these conversations.

In today’s rapidly changing environment, organisations that rely on conventional management methods are likely to lose out to more progressive competitors.

Instead, they should explore how virtual bargaining can lay the foundations of a culture where self-organising teams thrive.

Further reading:

How to build a more ethical team

The seven key competencies for collaborative leadership

The consistency trap: How to make better decisions

The social contract in miniature: How virtual bargaining supports team production

Hossam Zeitoun is Reader of Strategy and Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and Course Director for the Executive MBA based at the Warwick campus. He teaches Mergers and Acquisitions and Leading Organisations: Performance, Stakeholders, and Governance on the Executive MBA and Global Online MBA. He also teaches Strategic Thinking: Strategic Evaluation and Analysis on the Full-Time MBA and Accelerator MBA (London).

Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School and has written six books, including The Mind is Flat. He teaches Behavioural Sciences for the Manager on the Executive MBA and Global Online MBA. He also teaches Judgement and Decision Making on the School's MSc portfolio.

Tigran Melkonyan is Professor of Economics at the University of Alabama.

Learn more about developing a creative and collaborative culture within your organisation on the four-day Executive Education course Behavioural Science for Organisations and Innovation at WBS London at The Shard.

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