To start, I’d like to ask you a favour.
I’ve partnered with Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro, to once again run the State of Digital Agencies Report.
If you run your own digital agency or are a freelancer, please take 6-7 minutes to contribute your thoughts to the 2025 State of Digital Agencies Report.
Or if you work at an agency, please forward the link to the owner(s) of the agency and ask them to contribute.
Thank you!
It was actually the 2024 survey that showed us that very few digital agencies have returned to the office full-time, meaning that the majority are either fully remote or hybrid in their working environment.
As a manager, this can be a challenge, especially if your environment is one where the majority of your time is spent remotely and you don’t see your team face to face very often.
I’ve written before about how to manage a remote team. Today, I want to go a bit deeper into this and explore some of the other challenges that come with working this way.
The unique challenges of hybrid team management
Let’s take a brief look at some of the challenges that we’re seeking to address and overcome.
Understanding team vibes without seeing them in person
When you’re sitting in an office with someone every day, you can usually get a good feel for whether someone is happy, sad, enthusiastic, overwhelmed etc. You can sometimes tell just by looking at someone or by how they’re behaving during a meeting or during lunch. As a result, you may take a moment one-on-one with them to check in and see if they are okay.
This is not much harder when you’re working with someone remotely. Of course, you can sometimes read someone’s emotional state during a video call or by changing behaviours. But even if you can do this and recognise a potential problem, it can still be a bit harder to address because it’s easier for someone to remain guarded on a video call if you do follow up and check in with them.
If you scale this issue up to an entire team, it means that it can be trickier to get the feels on how morale and general state of the team is when everyone is in different locations. Not impossible, just trickier and something that we need to intentionally be aware of and overcome.
Showing your team who you are as a person
I felt this one a lot after the pandemic when my agency became a hybrid working environment and I was trying to lead a company of people who I rarely (or never) met in person.
My leadership style thrived most when I was in the same room as my team and company. Some team members even commented after the pandemic that new members of the team hadn’t “seen the real Paddy” because they hadn’t seen me walking around the office in my colourful socks.
It’s a tiny thing, but it was part of a bigger picture of how I led best when I was in the same room and able to allow people to see who I was day-to-day.
This simply didn’t happen when I was working in my spare room at home!
Now, this isn’t going to be the same for every manager. Some will be the opposite to me and may have actually struggled in-person and thrive remotely.
The key question is for you to reflect on the kind of manager you are and the environment that you thrive within. Then look at the environment that you’re working in.
If there is a mismatch between these, then you need to be aware of that and account for it.
Managing your own headspace due to increased communication channels
Communication software such as Slack existed pre-pandemic and managers needed to use it to communicate effectively with teams, even if those teams were in the same location. This may be for quick messages and private conversations, but also just for general collaboration and sharing of files / designs / tickets etc.
Now, these types of tools are also used for chatting almost constantly with team members. If you manage say, five people, then you probably have:
- A team channel where everyone can chat with each other.
- A few project specific channels where team members are split up a bit and talk about specific projects.
- Direct messaging channels with each team member.
It’s very easy to suddenly feel like you’re living in a chatroom for 7-8 hours a day. Ironically, even though you may be sat at home at your desk, you’re probably disturbed a lot more than you would be in the office and may find it difficult to get time for deep work.
Right, now let’s take a look at a few ways that you can overcome these (and other) challenges in a hybrid work environment world.
Focus on optimising for outcomes, not inputs
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest necessary shifts when it comes to managing a remote team. We can no longer worry about whether someone is sat at their desk for every minute of every day – spoiler: they’re not!
Instead, we need to focus on what we expect our team to deliver and then use time as a guideline as to how long tasks and projects should take. Think carefully about what a productive, effective, efficient day looks like for a team member – it isn’t being sat at their desk and being visible for 7-8 hours a day.
Whatever the answer is for your team, focus them on this and be clear that this is what you care about. Then support them to work in a way that enables them to get things done.
Use calls and meetings for more than task setting
One thing that’s harder to emulate when you work remotely is the “in-between” moments with meetings. Those moments when you’re walking to a meeting room together or when you are making some small talk in a meeting room whilst you wait for the meeting to start.
These are surprisingly valuable moments when it comes to being a manager. They are the moments when you learn how someone is doing, how their family is doing or what they got up to at the weekend.
These are moments that you connect with someone outside of the reason you’re meeting.
Try to replicate this when you join video calls – don’t be afraid to arrive early or start with a little bit of small talk. Take a few moments to check in with someone before the agenda kicks off and you talk work.
This is a very effective way to get a feel of how individuals and teams are feeling, enabling you to follow up if necessary.
Set boundaries for communication and deep work
When you become a manager for the first time, the chances are that you will still have your “old job” or at least big parts of it to still do. The projects that you worked on and managed before becoming a manager are unlikely to completely disappear.
As a result, you need to find a way to remain effective at getting things done whilst effectively managing your team.
You can do this by setting boundaries.
I think this is vital for managers to do. Not just for the sake of your own workload and effectiveness, but also to set the right example for your team who will see you doing this.
A few very practical ways to do this include:
- Blocking out time in your calendar for deep work, where your team isn’t allowed to book meetings.
- Setting yourself as away on Slack or Teams, telling your team that you’ll get back to their messages as soon as you can because you’re in deep work mode.
- Effectively processing emails and messages as a task, then moving onto deliverables and deep work – rather than answering emails and messages throughout the day.
- Take proper breaks and holidays where you leave your team to do their jobs and trust that they don’t need you.
If you do this, you can be far more productive and also show your team that you also need time to get your head down and get things done, helping you avoid the feeling of being overwhelmed and thus making you a less effective manager.
