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"In the hybrid work environment, there’s no such thing as over-communicating."

– Andy Freed, CEO, Virtual, Inc.

In this episode of 5 Minutes with Andy, Virtual, Inc. CEO Andy Freed provides practical insights for leaders on navigating communication in today’s hybrid workplace and building trust across in-office and remote teams.

Andy discusses:

• Why regular face-to-face interactions still matter.
• How leaders can adapt communication styles to overcome technology’s limitations.
• The importance of empathy and “over-communicating” in a hybrid setting.

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Tune in for tips on how to make meaningful connections with your team and communicate with impact, no matter where your employees are located.

Andy Freed (00:12 – 5:50)

Hello and welcome to Five Minutes with Andy. My name is Andy Freed. I'm the CEO of Virtual Incorporated. For the last 25 years, Virtual Incorporated has been helping associations, standards bodies and consortia make their mark on the world. Today, we're going to spend five minutes talking a bit about communications and specifically, communications in the hybrid age. Over the last four years, we've had a dramatic change in the workforce. You might not have noticed, but there was some kind of a pandemic a few years ago and that changed the way people work.

Now at Virtual, we named the company years ago, in part because we believed in telework. So, none of this teleworking and hybrid communications and hybrid work style was new to us, but it certainly has changed in the last few years and changed the way that organizations need to communicate. There's a few things that we'd recommend as best practices. And a few things that I would recommend as you work forward with your organizations on this.

First is to remember more than anything that as a leader, you need to build trust and relationships amongst your team. Now, there aren't that many trusted relationships that I've built in my life purely over the phone and purely over Teams. So, some level of face to face is always valuable. Even if it's just getting people together once a year to meet each other and get a face for a name, find out how tall they are and just connect. It's really important from time to time to value that connection point and recognize that face-to-face communication has been how we've built relationships over the last thousands of years of humanity, and it still is today.

Why is that? Well, in part because one of the things that's so important on building trust and relationships are things like eye contact. I don't know if you've noticed, but you can't make eye contact on Teams or Zoom. You can look at the camera, you can look at the screen, you can't do both at the same time. So, getting people together is important. If you can't do that, spend some time just on the human side of things. Something we've lost in online meetings is the five minutes before the meeting.  When you get together face to face, people spend five minutes on niceties and pleasantries on things like how's your family? How was your weekend? Where are you from? Often when we're connecting in a hybrid way, we skip that thinking that we're going to get right down to business. But the reality is building trust and building that relationship means that the business goes faster.

As we use technology, we also have to remember things like email and its limitations. Email is a great way to connect, but email also has no tone. Punctuation can make a big difference in email. Let's remember that difference between “Let’s eat Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma”. Those are two very different things that you can only convey by really talking to somebody. Now, one of those might save grandma's life. So, it's really important that we connect and we understand the limitations on the communications tools that we have.

As you're leveraging technology, also remember things like video are so important. One of the things that was phenomenal in the early stage of the pandemic, as we used video, is it actually started to build trust because we were having a window into one another's homes and a window into people's true environments and that built trust. Now, of course, people then decided, I don't like this window. They started adding backgrounds. They started doing things that obscured where they were. Studies have shown that some of these backgrounds actually diminish trust and diminish people's ability to communicate because right away, you're putting yourself on a false front. You're creating something that's not true for folks.

As you're doing this and as you're communicating in a hybrid space, also remember that it's really important to have a sense of empathy that the people on the other side of the communication, well, they're people, they're not just boxes on Teams. And one of the things that I've seen that's been challenging is people have been more isolated than ever. That should come as no surprise as we've literally put ourselves into different boxes on the screen that we're no longer seeing ourselves as together.

All of this means that the same aphorism is always true, that you need to overcommunicate and over process the messages that you're sending out to folks. It's been said that the biggest illusion on communication is the illusion that has been accomplished. The reality is you're only communicating when the other person has heard the message, not when you've just said it. That can be harder to pick up in a hybrid environment but it's so, so important and important that you're able to have those moments to connect with each other.

Hybrid work isn't going away. We're not all going back to how it was and that's fine. Technology over time has been able to bring people together from across the world, but it's important as we do that, we recognize its limitations and how to use it best. Thanks for joining. Talk to you again soon.

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