Social distance refers to the emotional connection, or lack thereof, among team members, particularly in remote work environments. As teams become more geographically dispersed, the potential for increased social distance can hurt team dynamics, leading to feelings of isolation and a lack of cohesion within the group.

Negotiation and leadership experts have long advocated for perspective-taking—attempting to understand your counterpart’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. The result is reduced social distance. – hbr.org

If employees feel disconnected, it becomes more challenging to establish trust, maintain open communication, and foster a sense of belonging, which are all crucial for effective team collaboration.

The Challenge Of Connecting And Coordinating In Dispersed Teams

In dispersed teams, connecting and coordinating with one another can be daunting. Differences in time zones, work schedules, languages, and cultural backgrounds can all contribute to the challenges of remote collaboration. As a result, team members may find it difficult to develop strong working relationships, share knowledge effectively, and stay aligned with their colleagues’ goals and priorities. This can lead to miscommunication, confusion, and a decline in overall team productivity.

In response to the diverse needs of its global community, Cloverleaf is refining its platform by integrating core features and functions in multiple languages. Currently, users can select Spanish or German within their dashboard and enjoy the Cloverleaf experience in their chosen language. This enhancement aims to provide a more inclusive and accessible experience for users worldwide.

The hybrid work model has become increasingly popular as it offers a unique blend of benefits, including increased engagement, autonomy, and collaboration. It represents a new work era where employees can choose where and when they work best, and organizations can foster a culture of trust, creativity, and productivity.

Although some employers may require a set number of days for hybrid employees to be in the office, a recent Gallup® poll shows that only 43% of employees reported having such a requirement.

Recently, Tuesday through Thursday appear to be the days that hybrid employees often choose to work in-office and are also the days that most employers require employees to work in-office.

Hybrid work has been around for a long time, but it’s evolved with new standards, challenges, and best practices. Companies are wisely exploring the best ways to balance in-office and remote work to meet the needs of their employees and the organization.

What Is Different About The Workplace Compared To Previous Years?

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the work landscape experienced a transformation, with hybrid work models emerging as a new demand for employers to figure out. Below are significant factors that influence the meaning and significance of hybrid workplaces.

Rapid-Changing Technology

The widespread adoption of cloud computing, collaboration tools, and virtual communication platforms has made remote work more accessible and efficient. This has enabled organizations to adopt hybrid work models, providing employees with increased flexibility in where they work.

Changing Employees Attitude

COVID-19 accelerated the change in employees’ perspectives on work, with many now placing greater importance on work-life balance. This shift in attitudes has led to a growing demand for hybrid work arrangements.

What people are looking for isn’t flexibility of location. It’s the flexibility of time. The pandemic has shown everybody that we’re whole humans. All this hybrid talk misses the fact that it’s not the geography, the location. It’s the flexibility of being a whole human. – Marcus Buckingham

Employees care about balancing in-person and remote because it enables them to prioritize life outside work, leading to a more well-rounded and fulfilling life.

New Management Approaches

Bridging the gap between remote and in-person teams and facilitating seamless collaboration requires different thinking, new tools, streamlined processes, and transparent communication to ensure they have the resources to manage and support a hybrid workforce effectively.

Increasing Focus on Employee Wellbeing

Exploring how to motivate employees is driven by recognizing that happy and healthy employees are more productive, engaged, and likely to stay with the organization for longer.

It’s imperative for employers to understand and facilitate hybrid work models that acknowledge individuals’ humanity. If not, leaders will retain top talent and high-potential employees.

For some, this is the first time they’ve worked from home. For others, this is the first time they’ve worked from home full-time. Given this backdrop, it’s important to think about how well you’re doing at managing your home work boundaries.

You can take an assessment called “Managing Work-Home Boundaries” to see how you stack up. This 12-question assessment is free, validated, and theoretically grounded. Your assessment will automatically generate your scores and a comparison to your peers.

Integration Versus Segmentation

The first step in managing work-home boundaries is understanding where you fall along the integration-segmentation continuum.

• Integrators enjoy the dynamic and fluid nature of going back-and-forth between work and non-work tasks. Integrators are better suited to be remote employees and feel more efficient as they simultaneously make progress in both domains.

• Segmenters prefer to keep clear boundaries between work and home domains. Without proactive work-home boundary management, segmenters struggle when working from home and commonly cite feeling frustrated and distracted when work and home domains are intermixed.

• Context-Dependent. Note that many will find themselves somewhere between these two extremes. This means that preferences for integration or segmentation for most work arrangements are context-dependent. Those in the middle should pinpoint the domain-specific circumstances where they prefer one approach or the other.

Behavioral Tactics

There are several ways to manage your work-home boundaries to ensure that you maintain your desired amount of segmentation for your workday.

• Using Technology. Consider using separate email accounts (or email filtering), scheduling software that blocks off work and family time, Automated Coaching™ responses (via text, social media, email, Slack, or the like), and status messages to retain work-home boundaries.

• Disruption Allowance. Decide in advance for which activities in each domain you are and are not welcoming minor disruptions. For example, perhaps Zoom work meetings are the only time you won’t allow home-related interruptions. During family time, perhaps you’ll only field calls from your supervisor, but everything else gets screened for urgency and importance.

• Physical Boundaries. Where we sit matters. To the extent possible, create spaces like a home office that are off-limits to family and, in the longer term, seek several locations outside of the home where you can comfortably get work done. For example, coworking spaces are becoming ubiquitous, and it might be worth the investment.

Temporal Tactics

There are two time-related tactics that can help maintain WFH segmentation preferences.

• Blocking Off Time. Experiment with blocking off days and timeframes where a specific type of work or home domain activity will be completed. Make it clear to colleagues at work, and family and friends at home, that those timeframes are non-negotiable. 

• Maintaining Equilibrium. This tactic entails balancing out the amount of time you spend in the work and home domains across a longer period of time than the traditional 24-hour timeframe. Many remote workers, for example, accommodate for early morning or late afternoon childcare transitions by working during designated times on the weekends. Relatedly, may employees take extended vacations after dolling out extra hours during a spike in seasonal work demands.

Communicative Tactics

All of the tactics discussed thus far are dependent on how well you communicate the rationale behind your decisions.

• Managing Expectations. Don’t assume that colleagues or family members will know your work-home boundary intentions. You don’t have to broadcast your personal situation to colleagues. Keep it clear and simple. When managing expectations at home, explain why you’re employing certain tactics. Make sure they understand that you’re managing boundaries so that you can be present and fully available during non-work hours.

• Discussing Violations. It’s inevitable that your work-home boundary preferences will be violated. It’s in these moments where you ultimately determine whether your tactics will flourish or flop. This is the hardest part of the process. Stick up for yourself, but be sure to be empathetic and reasonable while doing so.

In many ways working in an office around your co-workers is easier when it comes to work-home boundary management. The physical distance and commute does much of the work for us. But now, as we transition towards more opportunities to work from home, it’s our responsibility to figure out how to do it right.

Start by thinking through your integration-segmentation preferences, and then start experimenting with the aforementioned tactics. Keep in mind that it’s likely to be an ongoing experiment, not a black-and-white, one-time solution. Continue to take ownership of your time and space. You deserve it.

Visit www.scottdust.com for more free resources for human capital enthusiasts, including a free e-book titled “A Field Guide to Human Capital Assessments.” 

Everyone loves rewards. They’re a fantastic source of motivation, along with an effective incentive to keep your team’s spirits high.

There are two main types of rewards you can use to motivate your team: intrinsic and extrinsic.

An intrinsic reward is an offering or gift with no tangible, physical presence, like a compliment or recognition for excellent contributions. Extrinsic rewards, on the other hand, are tangible items such as bonuses, trophies, plaques, or ‘Employee of the Month’ badges.

Both types of rewards can help to boost office morale and keep your staff motivated—but the true magic happens when you combine them. If you’re trying to figure out which type of reward would best suit your team, you need to take a closer look at the kinds of goals they’re aiming to achieve.

The Right Time for Intrinsic Rewards

Intrinsic rewards are best suited for acknowledging ‘immeasurable’ or subjective goals. They have a more powerful and longer-lived effect on your team’s attitude than extrinsic rewards do. If you plan on making a long-term positive impact on your team and encouraging certain actions or beliefs, intrinsic perks are your bet best.

There are so many ways to use this reward type to motivate your staff force. Recognizing their strengths, efforts, and achievements is quick, simple, cost-effective, and one of the best possible ways you can go about ensuring your staff remains loyal to your organization.

Intrinsic rewards can include employee of the month accolades, regular shout-outs, or even one-on-one meetings between employees and supervisors. In these meetings, contributions are praised and encouraged.

Regardless of how you reward your employees, remember to make sure your approach is inclusive and sensitive to their needs, expectations, and personal beliefs. Take time to figure out what inspires each of your workers so you can reward them in a way that engages and makes them feel appreciated and respected.

The Right Time for Extrinsic Rewards

You should ideally offer extrinsic rewards when there’s an obvious and measurable goal your team is trying to reach. You can use close monitoring and reporting to determine whether or not the team has hit its goal, and then reward them as you see fit.

It’s also recommended that you add a time frame to your extrinsic reward goals. This gives your team the incentives they need to work harder and quicker towards the objective at hand. 

Moreover, it’s useful to create a hierarchy of company rewards. This allows you to offer predetermined rewards that match the amount of work your team puts in within a given time frame. If you give your staff force a major goal to achieve, make sure the prize is tempting enough to incentivize them to work towards it in good time.

You can offer smaller rewards, such as advanced paychecks, for workers achieving more minor goals. Even the simplest of offerings can motivate workers to accomplish easy feats like accurately reporting their hours, or submitting documents by specific deadlines.

Reserve larger, juicier rewards like gift cards and annual bonuses for notable achievements like boosting sales by a certain figure, or significantly improving production rates to a preset level. We recommend breaking down major goals into smaller objectives, each with its own small reward, for motivating employees and adding employee engagement throughout the process to keep team members on track.

Office birthdays are a part of most company cultures, so there is no reason to stop this tradition when teams are working from home.

You can choose to organize virtual birthday parties yourself or assign this task to different people as seems suitable. There are lots of birthday party ideas for work that make sense in a virtual workspace, such as online karaoke sessions, masquerade balls, and even murder mystery games!