Out of sight, out of mind?

How clarity makes everyone in a hybrid team feel accounted for

Photo by Joshua Newton on Unsplash

This is the story of a real person I interviewed for Your Resource Is Human. How much do you relate to this experience? Hit reply and I’ll receive your message in my personal email.

Kathy is a manager for a multinational sports equipment maker that is headquartered in the UK. Kathy finds out one day that a meeting has happened with everyone at her level, in her division, but strangely she wasn’t invited. She assumes there must have been a reason. But what? Is an org change coming? Was she going to lose some of her remit or be removed from a high-profile project?

She asks the organizer of the meeting if they can send her the recording or the presentation from the meeting, but they are slow to send it. Kathy starts to feel angry about having a right to the information and not being able to get it.

Kathy starts to analyze everything she’s said or done over the last several weeks wondering if she made a mistake somewhere along the line that has led people to lose confidence in her.

She is starting to convince herself that senior leaders have decided that having her in a meeting serves no purpose whatsoever. Someone finally sends Kathy the presentation, but she’s so demoralized she hardly cares what she is looking at. It wasn’t that important a meeting, no, but why wasn’t Kathy invited? There’s still no reason, until suddenly an email pops into her inbox from the organizer: “Sooooooo sorry! I just realized you were left off. I was using an old distro!"

The facts behind the feelings

When we work at a distance from our manager and our teams, we are on a continuous hunt for cues that we are in good standing, much more than when we work with these same people in a physical office.

It is a kind of paranoia—but an entirely rational one. It’s based on a fear that others mean you reputational harm, because you have little information to prove otherwise. Even a smile in an elevator or the CEO holding open the door for you, or making you a cup of tea (which, yes, happened to me once!) send a subtle signal that you are accepted and part of the group. When we are working at a distance, those cues evaporate and paranoia about our standing takes its place.

Indeed, sadly, there is data that proves that our standing is at risk when we don’t work physically together. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom’s landmark study of remote work at the Chinese travel agency Ctrip found that the remote work sample group was promoted less than their in-office counterparts.

The tendency to value the work of an in-office employee more than that of a remote worker is a phenomenon called “proximity bias” and its alive and well in the hybrid workplaces of today.

The power of clarity

If these fears arise because of a lack of information, managers can start to neutralize the problem by providing more information, espcially clarifying roles & responsibilities, ensuring work is equitable, and giving equal weight to the contributions of each direct report regardless of where they are.

Clarity tip #1: Enable your teams to work asynchronously

According to remote.com, the definition of asynchronous work is the practice of working on a team that does not require all its members to be online simultaneously. It’s often praised by remote-first companies as being a key tactic in enabling both collaboration and flexibility. It requires sophisticated tools and a culture that enables and champions it, and its prominent reliance of documentation helps give minute-to-minute clarity on what work is in progress. Those in the know just call it “a-sync.”

The focus on documentation is key. With a-sync, you know you can leave the work when it’s time to go offline and someone else in the team will pick it up where you left off. Asynchronous documentation of work keeps projects moving whenever people can be online, and gives clarity to project status at all times of the day or night. Total transparency.

This file sharing and documentation technology is more than convenient and practical — it reinforces belonging and gives clarity to workflows but also to an individual’s standing in the group.

Would clarity of roles and workflows help you feel more relaxed about your standing in your group? Could you ask your manager for that? Hit reply with your experiences and I’ll get a message in my personal email. Or leave your thoughts in the comments.