Workout: Myth-Matched

Understanding hybrid work collection (Part 5 of 5)

🎯 Spend one of your team meetings discussing myths about hybrid work.
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• PDF of the Workout to share with colleagues and participants

🙌 5+ People | ⏱️ Time: 50+ Minutes | 🌡️ Difficulty: Medium

This workout is designed to highlight common misconceptions about hybrid, remote, and flexible working policies within your organization. The results of this workout can be used later during a Hybrid Q&A session.
Before you get started:
💡 For this workout, you’ll be using breakout rooms, so make sure you have a way to create smaller groups. About 3-5 people is best.
• Most popular video conferencing programs have a “breakout room” function.
• If you don’t have access to software with a breakout room feature, you can also have teams connect to smaller meetings separately before coming together as a large group at the end.
• If your meeting is all in-person, make sure there’s enough space to separate people so they can have discussions in small groups.

Why?

This workout is designed to check the pulse of the team. Participants will get a feel for their personal and team-level understanding of hybrid, remote, and flexible work arrangements.
Managers can use this exercise to get an understanding for how their team feels about hybrid work. This information can help shape future team processes.
⚡ Some questions may surface from team discussions. These questions can be banked for later Hybrid Q&A sessions.
🎯 The aim of this session is to uncover and address the hybrid myths that affect your team the most.

In advance

📆 One day before

✅ Make sure you have a plan for breaking up teams into small groups.
✅ Send out an email or message to your team asking them to review these common concerns about hybrid working, and to think about their experience with each.
You can start your message like this:
“We’re going to spend part of our next team meeting exploring common concerns about hybrid work, and how they relate to our workplace. Before our meeting, spend a few minutes thinking about the following hybrid topics and your experience of them. Have you heard these before? Do they exist in our workplace? Do you believe them? Come prepared to share your thoughts!”
• Hybrid is a new, uncharted way of working.
• Teams aren’t as efficient after switching to hybrid.
• Remote employees aren’t as productive.
• Remote employees are overlooked when it’s time for a promotion.
• Remote employees aren’t as engaged in company culture.
💬 … or you can put it into your own words.

On the day

Open the meeting
✅ Start the meeting. Give an overview of the exercise and let everyone know that you’ll be forming smaller breakout groups.

⏱️ [0:00 – 0:05]: 😃 Introduce it by saying this:

“We’ve probably all heard about hybrid work by now. There are a lot of pros and cons to hybrid work, but there are also a lot of myths and misconceptions.
Today, we’re going to talk about a few common concerns surrounding hybrid work, and get to know each other’s experiences and feelings about them.
Our goal is to come away with a better understanding so we can shape our norms and processes. We can’t make things better if we don’t identify what’s not working.”
💬 … or you can put it into your own words.

⏱️ [0:05 – 0:20]: 🧭 Breakouts

✅ Divide people into groups. Let them know they’ll be returning in 15 minutes.
💡 Pro tip: If your breakout groups are larger, extend their time to ensure they can have a thorough discussion.
✅ Remind them that when they come back, you’ll ask each team to share what they talked about.
✅ Start the small group discussion.

⏱️ [0:20- 0:45]: 🧭 Group discussion

✅ Bring everyone back together.
✅ Start the group discussion. You can choose a group/person to report back randomly or ask for a volunteer.
Ask each group to share highlights from their conversation, and any ‘A-ha’ moments they had.
You can say:
“Welcome back. I’d like to hear a bit about what each group talked about — any volunteers to share the highlights from their conversation, or any ‘A-ha’ moments you had?”
Once each group has shared, use the following question to encourage the team to share any myths that haven’t been brought up in the group conversation yet:
“Thanks for sharing everyone. Did any group uncover any new concerns that we haven’t talked about yet?”

⏱️ [0:45 – 0:50]: 👏 Wrap it up

Once everyone has shared, wrap up the conversation. You can say:
“Thanks for contributing to this conversation. Hybrid can be hard to get right. Learning about each other’s experiences of it — and which issues impact us the most — can help us do it better. I appreciate you all taking the time to share today.”

Afterwards

Take note of anything that came up during your discussion. Pay special attention to any common threads or concerns, especially those that you need to address urgently.
✅ Keep track of any actions you pledged to take and make sure you follow through with them.
✅ Later, you can host a Hybrid Q&A session and incorporate some of the feedback in your Q&A.

Download this workout as a PDF

Workout – Myth-Matched

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