Prior to now, hybrid working environments have never existed on a wide-scale basis. With few proven best practices to rely on, you need to work together with your team to create a new playbook for how to get the best out of the team and its individual members.

By necessity, this involves a lot of experimentation. To capture the lessons from these experiments, it will be essential that your people are willing to ask questions to gain clarity, share ideas on how to do things differently, and voice concerns when things aren’t on track. And this can only happen if your team members believe they are safe to do so.

Unfortunately, biology is not on your side. By default, people want to avoid looking ineffective or incapable to their leader. To foster psychological safety on your team, it’s not enough to encourage your people to speak up. You need to consistently demonstrate that it’s expected, appreciated, and rewarded.

Level the playing field

Like it or not, your people are hard-wired to view you as a threat. The amygdala, sometimes referred to as our “lizard brain,” is constantly scanning the environment for threats – and, according to Your Brain at Work author, Dr. David Rock, social threats like an imbalance of power are no exception. As much as you tell your people they can be honest with you, the amygdala will override the logical part of the brain until it has witnessed a pattern of behaviour consistently enough to convince it you’re not a threat.

“Telling people to speak their mind won’t yield any results if they haven’t seen a predictable pattern of behaviour from you that it’s safe to do so.”

In other words, telling people to speak their mind won’t yield any results if they haven’t seen a predictable pattern of behaviour from you that it’s safe to do so. You have to show them, over and over again, that the only thing that will result is a better work environment.

To sow the seeds of psychological safety, you need to set clear expectations with your team, ask for specific input on a regular basis, and practice responding positively – even when you don’t like what you hear, the timing is bad or the input is delivered in a way that triggers you.

Change the frame

People are unlikely to speak their mind when given a vague invitation for feedback. Consider the response you get when you ask someone “How are you?” Most of the time the reply is some version of “Busy but good.” or “Could be worse.”

Change the frame by explicitly stating that as the team adapts to a hybrid model, there will be much to learn and it is critical that everyone shares what is going on from their point of view. Emphasize that for the team to be successful, people need to speak up. Be clear that the expectation is that people will share ideas, ask questions, voice concerns, and admit mistakes.

“Be clear that the expectation is that people will share ideas, ask questions, challenge consensus, and admit mistakes.”

Walk the talk

After framing the expectation, reinforce it by consistently asking people for input. Instead of asking “any questions?”, which tends to garner nodding heads and silence, ask a variety of specific questions to surface where people are at.

Recognize the effort and impact

When people do voice their opinion, reinforce that behaviour by specifically describing what they’ve done right, illustrating the behaviour’s positive impact, and expressing appreciation for the effort. When it’s warranted, be sure to acknowledge the emotional component as well.

Manage your outside voice

In some cases, encouraging this behaviour might be difficult. Suppose that you are just wrapping up a planning meeting at one of your in-person days in the office when Janelle excitedly suggests a new approach. Aside from the terrible timing, the idea itself raises huge red flags for you.

Internally you might be thinking “going that route would be a complete disaster!” But if your inside voice becomes your outside voice, you’ve just made the environment a little less safe for people to provide input.

To help you convey that input is welcome, even in moments when you’ve been triggered, a simple 3 step process can help.

  1. Pause: take a moment to breathe and ask yourself what the moment needs from you.
  2. Acknowledge: a simple thanks is often enough.
  3. Respond: in most cases you will need to get more clarity, provid clarity, or delay the matter and revisit later.

They’ll believe it when they see it

When people feel safe to share ideas, voice concerns, admit mistakes and ask questions, you have better access to the information you need to keep your team on a path to high performance. Foster psychological safety on your team by framing input as essential to success, asking for the input you need, and recognizing your people for doing the right thing.

Learn skills for leading in a hybrid world

Leaders who are able to leverage the advantages and mitigate the challenges of hybrid work will build high-performing teams at a time when engagement and commitment are at risk.

Learn practical skills for leading hybrid teams in our program, Leading in a Hybrid World.

How Leaders Enable High-Performing Hybrid Teams

The transition to a hybrid work model is replete with hazard and risk: Can our people adapt to yet another major change in the way we do business? It also presents a unique opportunity to create new systems that work for companies and people – a culture of high performance in which people are truly committed. To capitalize on this opportunity, organizations need leaders who are motivated by a compelling vision of what’s possible and can adapt their skills to shape their environment. In this webinar, Third Factor Principal Trainer, Garry Watanabe, will uncover the opportunity present in the transition to hybrid work and showcase how leaders can get the most from it. The session will explore the challenges and advantages of hybrid work from a leader’s perspective, present an approach for building consensus and commitment in the face of novel problems, and introduce strategies to overcome some of hybrid work’s biggest challenges. You’ll leave with an exciting vision for a high-performing hybrid culture, a clear understanding of your people leaders’ assets and challenges in a hybrid environment, and insight to how leadership competencies can be adapted for hybrid teams. You should attend if:
  • You’re responsible for maintaining employee engagement in the transition to a hybrid work environment
  • You’re responsible for developing leadership competency for a hybrid model of work
  • You’re a senior leader concerned about hybrid work’s impact on performance
  • You want new ideas and practical tools for leading your own hybrid team

How Leaders Enable High-Performing Hybrid Teams
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About the presenter: Garry Watanabe is a lawyer, an instructor at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, an inspirational speaker, and holds a Masters Degree in Sport Psychology. Whether he’s on the pool deck, in the classroom, or at the lectern, Garry is the consummate coach.
As in many sports, when navigating uncertainty it helps to “look where you want to go.” In his latest article for HBR, Third Factor CEO, Dane Jensen, outlines a process for imagining a plausible, positive version of the future and taking steps to actually get there. Read the article at HBR.org. Our company’s roots go back to the 1988 Olympic Games in Calgary, Alberta. Our founders, Peter Jensen and Sandra Stark, were mental performance coaches to Canada’s figure skating team – a team that won 3 out of Canada’s 5 medals on home soil. The business community took notice, and Peter and Sandra were soon working with organizations across the country to apply the principles they used in sport to a wide variety of other settings. Fast forward to 2022 and Olympic Sport is still our top R&D lab. We work with athletes and coaches at the highest level to understand how they perform, collaborate and lead, and synthesize their best practices for use across disciplines – from business, to academia, industry, philanthropy and beyond. We’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of athletes and coaches who are representing Canada at the Beijing Games. Here’s a roundup of who we’ll be cheering for this February.

The Canadian Ski Team

Ski Cross is one of the most exciting freestyle skiing events at the Games. We’ve been proud to work with the athletes and coaches on both the men’s and women’s teams to help them build self-awareness, leverage their strengths, and perform under pressure. We’ll be cheering them on in the Ski Cross events on February 17th & 18th. Our work with Alpine Canada has also taken us to the downhill skiing events. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Team Canada at the men’s and women’s Slalom, Giant Slalom, and Super-G events.

Figure skaters from around the world

Brian Orser and Tracy Wilson are not just Olympic medallists, but widely regarded as the top coaches in the sport. They’ve shared their perspectives on performing in critical moments with us, and we’ll be cheering on their skaters as they compete for the podium in Beijing. Tracy Wilson is an Olympic Medallist and 7-time Canadian champion

The Canadian Women’s Hockey Teams

We’ll be staying up late to watch Team Canada battle to reclaim Gold. We’ll also be keeping our eye Marie-Philip Poulin who is not just one of the best pressure performers in the world, but the best hockey player in the world, full stop according to our co-founder Peter Jensen.

3×4 Coaching

As supply chain issues and staffing challenges continue to hammer organizations, there are two critical moments that determine whether people will stay committed and rise to the challenge: The crisis of engagement, when people realize their path forward is harder than they thought it would be; and the crisis of meaning, the emotional low that makes them question whether to continue. To stay committed and see the journey through, people need three things from their leader: clarity on what they’re supposed to be doing and why it matters; the skills and abilities to be confident in their job; and a sense that they’re seen and appreciated. In this webinar, Third Factor Principal Trainer, Garry Watanabe, will synthesize our 30 years of experience working with world-class coaches and reveal a simple framework to give leaders the mindset, skills and tools to keep people committed – and ultimately drive results. You’ll leave inspired with fresh ideas for addressing problems caused by the “great resignation” and other pandemic-related disruption, and a clear image of how you can use coaching at all levels of your organization to fight burnout and keep people engaged. You should attend if:
  • You’re responsible for maintaining employee engagement and retention despite serious disruption
  • You’re an L&D practitioner frustrated by other coaching programs that deliver poor results
  • You’re a senior leader looking to drive performance without sacrificing a positive culture
  • You want a new approach for getting commitment and results from the people you lead

Coaching in Critical Moments
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About the presenter: Garry Watanabe is a lawyer, an instructor at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, an inspirational speaker, and holds a Masters Degree in Sport Psychology. Whether he’s on the pool deck, in the classroom, or at the lectern, Garry is the consummate coach.
Imagine you’re organizing an in-person learning event for a group of 30 senior leaders. You’ve spent weeks getting the details just right. It’s the first time this group will be getting together in over two years, and you can’t wait for two days of interactive, collaborative learning. And then, the calls start to come in. One week out from the event, the head of marketing tells you there is a case of Covid-19 in her daughter’s classroom, and she will need to attend the session remotely to keep her in self-isolation. Then, three days before, two more calls come from sales leaders who need to travel to meet with clients and will need to participate remotely. In a matter of days, 10% of your group needs to attend remotely. More requests are sure to come in, and your team now needs to come up with a way to accommodate both in-person and remote learners on short notice. This is the new reality. The question is no longer whether to deliver learning remote or in-person – but rather whether to be fully remote or to host a hybrid learning experience. By assuming all in-person events will need to accommodate remote participants – and planning accordingly – you can create learning experiences that are ready to adapt to whatever may come.

Hybrid is to Netflix as in-person is to Blockbuster

Hybrid learning events struggle to achieve their goals when they’re treated as an in-person experience first. But as many industries have learned the hard way when undergoing disruption, you can’t do what you’ve always done and expect the same results. Much as Blockbuster failed to recognize Netflix as a serious disruptor, learning organizations stand to fail by ignoring the importance and permanence of hybrid learning.
Much as Blockbuster failed to recognize Netflix as a serious disruptor, learning organizations stand to fail by ignoring the importance and permanence of hybrid learning.
When L&D professionals do as Blockbuster did and try to carry on with business as usual, the result is a poor experience. The overarching problem is the lack of interactivity between in-person and remote participants, resulting from poorly adapted technology and resources, limited opportunities for participants to connect with each other, and a failure of the event organizers and facilitators to understand participants ahead of time. At the heart of solving these problems before they happen is a focus on creating a unified experience for all learners. Successful hybrid learning events do this by giving careful consideration to how technology is used, creating opportunities for participants to connect, and getting to know participants ahead of time. In delivering hybrid learning to our clients, we’ve observed some innovative practices that exemplify this philosophy.

Adapt technology to the human experience – not vice-versa

Inequality in hybrid learning environments often results when the human element is considered secondarily to technology. For example, remote participants suffer when their experience is made possible by a laptop placed near the front of the room. Thoughtful hybrid learning design considers the desired experience first and then uses technology to build quality and efficiency, creating a “one-classroom” model where all participants feel included and barriers to communication are removed.

Bring the online experience into the room

One of our clients, a major quick-service restaurant chain, added a screen at the front of the room displaying the online experience. This ensured everyone in the room, including the facilitator and participants, were constantly aware of the people who weren’t physically present.

Create a screen-friendly experience for online participants

In early 2020, our partners in the Full-Time MBA program at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University found a way for remote learners to experience the class in the same way as the in-person cohort by hiring a full-time videographer. As the approach has proven successful, the program is now leveraging technology to deliver the experience more efficiently with an automated system. As a low-cost alternative, the quick-service restaurant chain asked in-person participants to bring their laptops and join the online meeting, keeping their cameras on so remote participants could see faces and hear comments. An AV support team set up microphones at every table to ensure remote participants could hear discussions clearly and both the in-person and remote conversations were moderated. We like this approach enough that we’ve adopted it for our own hybrid staff meetings – with great success.

Have support to bridge the gap

The Smith MBA program addressed cross-medium communication challenges by placing a staff member in each classroom to act as a moderator, managing the incoming Zoom information and filtering it to the faculty to ensure the remote participation was managed efficiently.

Create opportunities for participants to connect with each other

What we know as we gain more experience through this hybrid world is that people are craving more opportunities to connect on both a personal and professional level with their colleagues – a part of the experience that’s often neglected for online participants. At larger events, we’ve seen this solved with formalized “brain dates” in which participants have scheduled time to meet one-on-one or in a small group, and indicate their preference to meet live, online, or hybrid. Meetings can be on a subject relevant to the event or less-formal opportunities for networking. Our team at Third Factor has addressed this by scheduling a regular meeting with cameras on to share from our learning experiences and connect about what’s happening at a personal and professional level. We don’t just stop there though, many of us set up informal coffee chats to reconnect with each other, have a laugh, and sometimes we actually have a coffee!

Understand the field before playing the game

In our 3×4 Coaching program, we teach that people can’t commit without having clarity on what’s expected and why it matters. Successful hybrid learning events require the organizers and facilitators to have clarity on who the participants are and what their needs are. One of our favorite ways of building clarity comes from the legendary basketball coach Jack Donohue, who would ask: “what would you see,” and “what would you hear.” I.e., what would you see and hear if you were a remote participant having a positive, engaging experience? The Smith MBA Program called this “understanding the field before playing the game.” The instructor got to know remote participants’ names and locations ahead of time, and was able to use that information to engage them – acknowledging them personally and asking questions of them throughout the session.

Keep your eyes wide open

As Albert Einstein said, “you can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” To execute successful hybrid learning events, learning & development teams need to recognize that the choice isn’t between remote and in-person learning; it’s between remote and hybrid. Every in-person event will inevitably need to accommodate remote participants, at least in the near-future. To ensure your next learning event is successful, this shift in designing your learning experiences will require thoughtful planning to put the human experience ahead of technology, create opportunities for participants to connect with each other, and get to know your participants ahead of time so everyone can be included. As people leave their jobs in record numbers, organizations are facing two urgent challenges: increase engagement to reduce churn; and prepare those who stay to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of the business. The solution to both of these challenges is to invest in people and get them excited about their own growth and development. People are more likely to stay – and more resilient to changing demands – when they feel a sense of growth, contribution and connection. But with 40% of employees saying they’re likely to leave their job within 6 months1, time is running out. Career Conversations is a highly interactive one-hour session that puts people leaders at the centre of a strategy for helping employees develop a clear and compelling view of their path forward in the organization. Leaders are introduced to the “why,” “what,” and “how” of career conversations, and begin engaging with their people before the hour is up. The program can be quickly implemented and scaled to the entire organization, effecting rapid, positive change. In this 60-minute webinar, Third Factor Associate Trainer Rishi Behari will introduce the Career Conversations program and unpack the leader’s toolkit for holding effective developmental conversations with their people. You’ll leave with a compelling image of what effective career conversations look like, new skills for converting that image into action, and a plan for holding career conversations with clear goals and accountability built in. You should attend if:
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This event has passed, but it won’t be the last. Be the first to know about future webinars from Third Factor by entering your information below.

About the presenter:

Rishi Behari is a professional coach, consultant, teacher, facilitator and speaker who has carved out an unlikely career path amidst adversity, pressure, and uncertainty, having grown up in an interracial family in the heart of the Canadian prairies.

Rishi has dedicated his professional life to helping others discover and realize their passions, dreams, and potential. He is known for injecting personality, humor, wit and infectious energy into his work and teaching. He draws from his and his students’ personal experiences in order to create an open, engaging and safe environment for leaders at all levels. His relentless desire to explore, innovate and challenge the status quo have made him a multidisciplinary force for igniting positive change in people and organizations.

Rishi comes to the Third Factor team with an impressive and eclectic background across industries, having worked with some of the top schools, businesses, and organizations in the world. His range of experiences include raising ten thousand dollars at the age of nineteen to fund his first entrepreneurial venture, appearing as a business expert on live international television, helping to establish the world’s first premier business program in artificial intelligence, sitting on the advisory board for Canada’s first student-run AI startup incubator, working in the not-for-profit sector to fight systemic inequality and discrimination, teaching in academia and over five years as the VP of a multinational consulting firm.

Rishi is a former university athlete in soccer, and an avid sports and travel enthusiast, having traveled to two World Cups of Soccer, the European Cup of soccer, and the Winter Olympics. His academic credentials include BAs in psychology and sociology and an MBA from the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University and IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.

1 Source: McKinsey What’s the most pressure you’ve ever been under? Dane Jensen joins CTV’s Your Morning to discuss what he learned by asking this question and share his advice for how you can use the energy that accompanies pressure to thrive.