‘We & Me’ It’s everyone’s favourite
Hybrid headaches
Team cohesion, collaboration and shared accountability for team performance. These are the most common problems senior leaders come to me with when flexible work is not yet hitting the mark.
It was 2022 when this first presented itself as a post-pandemic challenge following our unexpected working from home revolution. Senior leaders understood that hybrid work had its benefits and was probably here to stay, but it was such a shock to the system and we could all see that it needed some attention.
Moving from ‘Me’ to ‘We & Me’
During the pandemic, we understandably focused on the question, “Are you OK?”
That’s a question leaders would ask of people in their teams, being sensitive to the challenges people were experiencing in our blend of home and work lives. We necessarily focused on the individual.
We emerged from the pandemic and realised we needed to ask different questions now, not solely focused on the individual, but questions about what was best for the team and beyond. We needed to strengthen our ability to manage hybrid work as a team, for the collective good of everyone, moving beyond the needs of each individual.
This is where ‘We & Me’ came from. I wanted to create a tool that enabled leaders and teams to keep what was working from focusing on individuals’ needs, while also looking at the needs of the wider team.
It’s like a healthy ecosystem, where the needs of the individual are enhanced and upheld by the needs of the group, establishing a virtuous cycle.
The risk that some leaders were dealing with was the dynamic of a parasitic ecosystem, where the needs of the individual were at the expense of the needs of the group. Playing that scenario over time and unchanged looked like the whole thing would ultimately wither away.
The flex power tool
The value that people get from this particular tool in my Flexperts toolkit is considerable. It’s no wonder that it’s the most popular tool with leaders and one of the easiest places to begin their flex-team discussions. The results have been incredibly powerful.
One client reported back to me that there is a:
“...tighter sense of team and commitment to each other… There has been a change around what productivity looks like [and] the conversations are more honest.”
The benefits of the work we did together, which included using this power tool:
Stronger Team Cohesion: Each team established clear "anchor days" when members would be physically present together, doing the right work from the right places
Explicit Working Agreements: All three teams developed charters outlining and embedding their flexible working practices
Reframed Productivity: Teams shifted from viewing productivity solely as "time applied to tasks at home" to recognising the value of in-person collaboration
Enhanced Cross-Team Collaboration: Regular cross-team sessions were established and actively valued
More Honest Communication: Team members reported more authentic conversations about work allocation, progress, and challenges
The ‘We & Me’ tool is now available as a free download, so that everyone gets to experiment with it. You can use it to access solutions to these common issues around team cohesion, collaboration and shared accountability for performance.
Check out the link below to get your free copy!
