Are hybrid teams really that different from office-based or entirely virtual teams? Yes, to a certain degree. As organizations embrace flexible work, more people leaders will lead hybrid teams, and they need the skills and knowledge to do so. In this issue of TD at Work, Chris Coladonato explains ways talent development professionals can support and equip people managers with the tools and guidance to support their teams. She also details: • The unique qualities of hybrid teams and associated challenges. • Three critical areas of focus for managers leading hybrid teams • Strategies and tips for supporting people leadersTools & Resources in this issue are a team connection agreement guide, hybrid leadership in action guide, and communication and collaboration inclusion worksheet.

Bring out the best in your hybrid team with this invaluable resource Work from Anywhere delivers practical strategies and actionable guidance on how to develop a high performing team and business in a remote and distributed environment. Accomplished authors, behavioural experts, and fast-growth business leaders, Alison and Darren Hill, show you how to craft business and culture strategies to bring out the best in your hybrid and remote team members by focusing on both performance and people. You'll learn how to: Understand the unique psychology, methodology, and technology that makes hybrid teams excel Develop strategies for embedding high performance across your team, no matter where they're located Create rhythms and rituals to keep your team highly motivated and on task, and avoid disengagement The ability to work from anywhere is no longer just a HR conversation, it is an Executive conversation. Perfect for business leaders working with hybrid teams, Work from Anywhere is also ideal for organizational development executives, cultural transition leaders, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are responsible for ensuring that employees consistently perform at their best, regardless of location.

In this issue of TD at Work, Chris Coladonato explains ways talent development professionals can support and equip people managers with the tools and guidance to support their teams. --

Reinvent your organization for the hybrid age. Hybrid work is here to stay—but what will it look like at your company? If your organization is holding on to inflexible, pre-pandemic policies about where—and when—your people work, it may be risking a mass exodus of talent. Designing a hybrid workplace that furthers your business goals while staying true to your culture requires balancing experimentation with rigorous planning. Hybrid Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you adopt the best technological, cultural, and new management practices to seize the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of the hybrid age. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.

From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work -- and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed. "We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing." So says Laszlo Bock, former head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge. This insight is the heart of Work Rules!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto that offers lessons including: Take away managers' power over employees Learn from your best employees-and your worst Hire only people who are smarter than you are, no matter how long it takes to find them Pay unfairly (it's more fair!) Don't trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the future Default to open-be transparent and welcome feedback If you're comfortable with the amount of freedom you've given your employees, you haven't gone far enough. Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, Work Rules! also provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock takes us inside one of history's most explosively successful businesses to reveal why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work in the world, distilling 15 years of intensive worker R&D into principles that are easy to put into action, whether you're a team of one or a team of thousands. Work Rules! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Proven strategies to build, nurture, and retain world-class talent in a hybrid environment In The Successful Hybrid Team: What the Best Hybrid Teams Know About Culture that Others Don’t (But Wish They Did), award-winning diversity and inclusion expert Perrine Farque delivers an eye-opening look into what distinguishes world-class teams from the also-rans. The book explores the permanent changes being made in the modern workplace, how hybrid work is fundamentally changing the nature of teams, and the overwhelming importance of culture in determining performance. The author introduces a four-pillar framework that details what you need to do to hire, lead, and retain a high-performing team in a hybrid world. You’ll discover how to create a unified hybrid leadership team, how to build extreme clarity and transparency, how to overcommunicate through digital channels, and how to unify cross-cultural remote teams with cultural awareness. The book also offers: A deep dive into topics like how and why meetings are important, and how to best leverage them in a hybrid environment Descriptions of the most common pitfalls experienced by those leading hybrid teams and how to avoid them Useful tips, resources, and checklists that supplement the four-pillar framework discussed in the book A can’t-miss resource for executives, managers, and other business leaders who find themselves dealing with the new reality of hybrid and remote work, The Successful Hybrid Team will also earn a place in the libraries of human resources and DEI professionals, remote workers, and anyone else who regularly interacts with colleagues, direct reports, or supervisors in a hybrid environment.

Find out what your customers and employees are really thinking with this indispensable resource Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People delivers invaluable strategies for how leaders can make their communications more inclusive and access the voices of those employees who rarely feel empowered to speak up. As constituent numbers scale, leaders have traditionally struggled to make communications a conversation with the entire organization, settling instead for small focus groups, talking at people in town halls, and delivering surveys after the fact. The result is exclusive, narrow decision-making that disengages and under-utilizes talent and human capital. And now, as the remote environment grows, the challenge and imperative for engaging conversations on a wider scale is even greater. Scaling Conversations provides the solution. Having led a remote team for over a decade and having worked with thousands of leaders across North America, Dave MacLeod teaches you how to: Scale your business by listening to the voices that really matter Access and maximize the human capital in your organization Make decisions that create unity and move the group forward Decrease employee turnover caused by poor communication Within these pages, you'll learn how to better facilitate conversations with a wider and more representative array of clients and employees, and not just the loudest ones in the town hall meeting or Slack channel. Perfect for any leader who's responsible for understanding what employees are really feeling and thinking, Scaling Conversations also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who wants to learn how to discover what the “silent majority,” who are often drowned out by the loudest people in the room, actually believes.

From executives complaining that their teams don’t contribute ideas to employees giving up because their input isn’t valued--company culture is the culprit. Courageous Cultures provides a road map to build a high-performance, high-engagement culture around sharing ideas, solving problems, and rewarding contributions from all levels. Many leaders are convinced they have an open environment that encourages employees to speak up and are shocked when they learn that employees are holding back. Employees have ideas and want to be heard. Leadership wants to hear them. Too often, however, employees and leaders both feel that no one cares about making things better. The disconnect typically only widens over time, with both sides becoming more firmly entrenched in their viewpoints. Becoming a courageous culture means building teams of microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates working together. In our world of rapid change, a courageous culture is your competitive advantage. It ensures that your company is “sticky” for both customers and employees. In Courageous Cultures, you’ll learn practical tools that help you: Learn the difference between microinnovators, problem solvers, and customer advocates and how they work together. See how the latest research conducted by the authors confirms why organizations struggle when it comes to creating strong cultures where employees are encouraged to contribute their best thinking. Learn proven models and tools that leaders can apply throughout all levels of the organization, to reengage and motivate employees. Understand best practices from companies around the world and learn how to apply these strategies and techniques in your own organization. This book provides you with the practical tools to uncover, leverage, and scale the best ideas from every level of your organization.