Human connection is powerful. If leaders of virtual teams ignore this power, they miss out on an immense potential for fulfilling and rewarding work. By itself, this isn’t exactly news: if you Google “virtual teams”, you’ll get an endless list of articles that talk about the need to make real human connections for virtual teams to succeed. But these articles often don’t address what this advice actually implies.
After all: what does it really mean to make real connections in virtual teams?
Unfortunately, we’ve seen many leaders try to encourage real human connections in virtual teams by slapping on activities, much like a coat of paint, and getting back to work. And while certain activities like ice-breakers are one helpful way to start growing connections, just using ice-breakers skims the surface of the real issues we need to tackle.
In face-to-face work, genuine human connections develop alongside our work routines. In an office, as colleagues work, they connect. They start conversations around the water cooler. They eat together. They share news of their family and get to know each other as people. This built-in “space” for bonding isn’t just something “nice-to-have”; it’s a necessity for a healthy workplace.
But in the virtual world, this space for connection isn’t built-in in the same way. Instead, we need to intentionally create and nurture connections throughout the life-cycle of the team. Now let’s discuss how to start creating these connections. Real connections don’t begin with classes, five-step programs, or one-liners. Instead, they begin with presence.
Think for a moment: can you tell when someone is really with you in a conversation—even if they’re virtual? It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?
It doesn’t matter if it’s virtual or face-to-face: when someone is really paying attention to us, we feel respected, and the quality of conversation goes up. In virtual communication, when someone is truly present, they pay attention to the speaker without being distracted by the environment. They ask pertinent questions, and they communicate through words, tone of voice, and even silences, that they are invested in you and what you have to say.
On the other hand, we can also tell when someone isn’t really paying attention to us. When someone is tuned out, they check their phones, type on their keyboards, and reply with monosyllabic huh’s, yep’s, and how-about-that’s. It doesn’t feel good at all. If you show this non-presence to your virtual team, you show that you’re disengaged from them.
Take a few minutes to think about the following:
If you weren’t sure about either answer, don’t worry. Most of us aren’t even aware of how we show up for our colleagues or employees, or how we can improve.
Start to become aware of how you show up, and how you prepare yourself. Before your next virtual meeting or one-on-one conversation, think about how you can prepare yourself to show up:
These exercises should help you start to show engagement and presence within your virtual team. When you show that you’re engaged with your team, they’ll begin to engage with you. And out of this presence, you can start forging strong, genuine connections.
Learn the skills needed to lead a hybrid team. Rank your hybrid leadership skills with our self-assessment quiz.
Learn the top 6 strategies to keep your fingers on the emotional and task-related pulse of your team to increase level of engagement and productivity.
Learn how to strengthen individual and team resilience and ensure your team’s well-being.
Learn how to establish team norms and reinforce culture by using a Team Operating Agreement. A TOA is defined as a set of behavioural norms that the team agrees to abide by and it sets the stage for how the team will work together, resulting in improved team hybrid team collaboration.
Explore your mindset on leading a hybrid team and your team’s mindset on working in a hybrid team. Describe actions and behaviours you can take as a leader to shift these mindsets.
Learn how to improve productivity and engagement by getting genuine buy-in from team members.
Learn how address the challenges of time management and communication preferences in a hybrid environment.
Learn how to consolidate everything you’ve learned and apply it to your workplace.
Discover tactics to prep for every stage of the meeting process: pre, during, and post-meeting. Learn how to ensure engagement by running meetings that make every moment count.
Learn five techniques that build engagement right from the start and maintain the momentum throughout your entire virtual meeting.
Learn how to wrap up your meetings with key takeaways, clearly defined next steps, and accountability for deliverables. Ensure clarity, not confusion when team members leave the meeting.
Explore alternative ways to share information without relying so heavily on video meetings. Learn how to avoid Zoom fatigue by using other means of communication.
It’s common for virtual leaders to think “If I can’t see my employees, how do I know if they are doing the work”? Many lack the confidence to develop their team members by giving them the authority and autonomy needed to flourish in their virtual roles. This erodes trust and inevitably leads to burnout for leaders who try to do it all. This interactive program will give you real world practice in delegating from a distance.
Participants will learn how to:
Let go of control and feel confident that the right things are getting done in a timely manner. Effectively delegate with clearly articulated expectations. Empower your team and provide sufficient support to help them grow your business.
Hybrid team leadership is a relatively new experience for most organizations. In fact, 65% of experienced leaders have preventable failures in their first attempts at hybrid teamwork. That percentage is even higher for new managers. If poor leadership behaviours go unchecked, they become entrenched and grow over time. These are highly preventable failures that negatively impact the entire organization.
In this session participants will learn to:
You will be better equipped, more resilient, and confident in mitigating issues. Expose the silent threats that pose potential pitfalls. Build on effective hybrid leadership strategies that will benefit you, your team, and the company.
Is your team working optimally, or just working? Sometimes things are getting done, but engagement is elusive. When that happens, cohesion and creativity plummet.
Add the mask of technology and it’s an immense challenge to manage and optimize performance. Evaluations, performance reviews, or friction points all become less comfortable and harder to gauge.
You need ways to build and sustain engagement. You need strategies to build team creativity and responsiveness. You don’t need to be bogged down in micromanaging.
In this session, we will guide you in optimizing the performance of your people, not simply managing the metrics of performance.
In this session, you will learn how to:
Feel more confident about optimizing your hybrid teams’ performance at a distance. Use this wealth of practical knowledge, skills, and tips to help you and your team deliver on business objectives and achieve higher goals.
How do you measure your team’s performance? For many leaders and teams, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a core indicator of success but they stress output and not optimization or emotions.
Measuring through output ensures tasks are accomplished, but is that enough? Is creativity and innovation the norm, or is engagement being eclipsed by overwhelmed team members? Would you know how to tell early enough to act? While bottlenecks are easy to spot, burnout is not, especially from a distance.
In this session you will learn to:
With rapid technology shifts, continuous improvement programs, and pressure to respond to market demands with agility, today’s leaders must manage a blinding rate of change. Proven organizational change models provide a framework but may not provide a pathway to successful change that sticks for virtual teams.
In this session, we’ll delve into some pitfalls of virtual change and discuss strategies to manage change in a constantly evolving virtual world:
In this session the participants will learn to:
The hybrid nature of teams can make conflict management even more challenging than face-to-face team conflict. According to Lindred Greer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Conflict in virtual teams is more likely to have a negative impact on performance and is more likely to escalate.
In this session, we will explore the three types of conflict, and strategies to manage them in a hybrid setting.
In this session the participants will learn to:
So now you are assigning tasks virtually that were previously handled face-to-face. According to the Gartner Group, 50% of hybrid teams fail due to a lack of understanding about how to work virtually. Your team members are likely experiencing frustration and stress that can lead to dysfunction, resistance, and a failure to deliver on business objectives. Don’t blame the technology. Developing a high-performance team in a hybrid environment takes a whole new set of leadership skills.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Boost your hybrid team’s performance with skills to navigate their unique challenges. Build more trust, credibility, and reliance as a team. Top-performing hybrid teams have higher morale that increases productivity and job satisfaction. Creating a stronger and more interconnected virtual culture is essential to your resilience, economic prosperity, and competitiveness.
Hybrid team meetings come with unique challenges that can cause you problems if they are not addressed right away. Distractions, multi-tasking, and passive silence can be signs that your team members are feeling disconnected and dissatisfied. Ineffective hybrid meetings can cost your organization thousands of dollars and negatively impact your capacity to compete.
This program is designed to help you:
Meeting time means money. Use these proven techniques to optimize your meeting time and increase everyone’s productivity. Improving the hybrid meeting skills of your leaders and managers is essential in today’s world and an investment that will be felt right away and last into the future.
Coming up with ideas to fuel innovation can make some people feel very vulnerable. The physical cues that we pick up on when working in a shared physical space are less present in a virtual environment if they’re present at all. Sharing one’s thoughts often exposes one to instant judgment or the limiting beliefs of others. This can shut down creative thinking and lead to a lack of participation. Being innovative in a hybrid environment requires pre-planning and guided facilitation to ensure all participants are engaged, encouraged, and motivated to share openly with confidence and courage.
In this session, participants will learn how to:
With practical tools and tips that can be applied immediately, your team is ready to collaborate more effectively to build trust, respect, and a safe open space to share and develop ideas. Empower your hybrid team to solve complex problems and create a more innovative, competitive edge for your business.
The truth is, it’s more difficult for virtual team members to engage, connect, and work well with each other over time than it is for those who work face-to-face. Onboarding new members also requires additional management to successfully integrate them into the team. When new or existing members of a hybrid team feel disconnected, team performance can suffer from a lack of engagement and low morale. Poor working relationships breed misunderstandings, interpersonal conflicts, and absenteeism. It’s imperative to actively foster stronger hybrid team connections so everyone can move past growing differences and get back to work.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Equipped with this new set of interpersonal tools, your virtual team members can immediately mitigate team challenges in order to sustain strong relationships that bolster performance and productivity, a valuable outcome for your teams and your organization.
Every interaction has the potential to strengthen or break down a work relationship. Sadly, the latter is most often the case when different behavioural styles come into play. Virtual team members have the added disadvantage of not being able to pick up on some visual cues that speak volumes in understanding someone’s intentions. Misinterpreting other people’s behavioural styles can lead to friction and lack of conflict resolution.
Just think how much more productive your hybrid teams will be when each team member can:
The DiSC Behavioural Profile provides participants clarity about their own behavioural styles, and insights about those of others. By applying this methodology, your team will build and improve relationships one interaction at a time. More mindful communication enhances productivity, builds stronger relationships, and creates an optimal environment for
high-performance teams.
The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team® is a unique learning experience that prepares individuals for success in teams. The New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni and the power of industry-leading workplace assessment tools come together in a breakthrough program proven to deliver business results.
The program helps teams understand how they score on the key components of The Five Behaviors model: Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. Individual team members will learn about their own personality style and the styles of their team members—based on the Everything DiSC® model—and how their style contributes to the team’s overall success.
After completing this program, participants will understand how to:
Click here to download more information on The Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team.
All too often, a live on-line session is a one-way event with the speaker addressing the audience and limited audience interaction. With so many distractions, conflicting priorities and multitasking, even participants who want to be there will have a hard time focusing. It doesn’t have to be this way.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Deliver highly engaging, irresistible online content that is just as interactive as a face-to-face session. Engaging participants in active chats. Using whiteboards and annotation tools for real time collaboration. Facilitating breakout rooms to deepen the learning and create closer connections between your online learners. This is just the first step in making your training experience as brilliant online as it is in a live training room.
In general, people make a subconscious judgement in the first few minutes of entering a new situation. They may even come into your online session with a predetermined idea of the experience, particularly if they’ve had a bad virtual training in the past or are not particularly interested in the topic. You only have a few minutes to grab and keep their attention.
In this session you will learn how to:
At the end of the session you will be able to deliver more meaningful, impactful content in an engaging way right from the beginning of your training session. Keep it going with purposeful collaboration and interactions that are highly engaging and energizing. Take your training to the next level and leave your participants feeling more excited about future learning.
Practice makes perfect. You might not want to try out something new in a virtual classroom, where so many things can go wrong. Practicing or testing new skills for the first time can be nerve-racking. We are here to support you while you ramp up your virtual training skills with a practicum where you will have an opportunity to practice a training segment of your choice.
During this program you will have the opportunity to:
Take charge of the virtual environment with confidence. Deliver more effective training to suit the needs of your virtual learners. Attract and retain the attention of your online audience and enhance your training offers for your ideal clients.
In this course, you will develop technical and communication skills to produce a seamless online event. Learn best practices to effectively support, communicate with, and maintain group norms with virtual learners and facilitators before, during, and after the session.
In this course the participants will learn how to:
This course will prepare you for the full range of producer duties, from supporting a small virtual workshop complete with breakout rooms, to live webinars with hundreds of attendees. You will learn how to manage technical issues, create an effective back-up plan, and ensure you create an environment where technology challenges do not impact the learning or meeting experience.
In this course the participants will learn how to:
In this course you will gain practical experience by acting as a producer during an online session conducted by Virtual Team Builders, putting your knowledge and newfound skills into practice.
In this course the participants will:
The key to any successful project, large or small, is effectively working as a team. Microsoft TEAMS enables you to manage your team with online meetings, calls, and web conferencing. Their secure platforms allow you to share important information in a private environment while having live discussions and group chats. All the Microsoft Office applications integrate seamlessly into the TEAMS platform. Microsoft TEAMS provides you with all the tools you need to solve problems, meet objectives, and achieve your goals.
During this live on-line session participants will learn how to:
Technology allows us to connect with our virtual team but all too it is not used to its full capacity. In this session, we will devote time to exploring the advanced features of Webex. We will demonstrate how to encourage interactivity and collaboration, while learning how to facilitate a productive virtual meeting or training event.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
The latest and most widely used platform has experienced massive growth recently. ZOOM offers many of the same features as more established platforms and is a user-friendly space for your team to connect.
Participants of this program will:
Yes, Zoom fatigue is real. You feel it as a leader and your team feels it too. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using for your video calls, constantly relying on video conferencing to connect with co-workers can become exhausting. During this era of remote work with restrictions on in-person meetings, more and more people report feeling drained and burned out. Scientific studies have shown there are four primary reasons why video chats fatigue us. In this training session, we identify the reasons why and explore strategies to help you avoid video fatigue and still maintain connections with your team.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Empathy is the ability to understand where another person is coming from and bridge the gaps that divide us to create meaningful and mindful connections. For leaders using virtual communication, it can feel like wading through two layers of quicksand. You want to be able to empathize with the people you’re managing, while also trying to read the people you report to. As well, you may feel stressed yourself. This course will help you develop bi-directional empathy skills to be able to effectively connect with your team members and manage downward while also recognizing and relating to what’s going on above you.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
An inclusive work environment makes leaders and their employees feel that they belong, that they’re respected for what they contribute, and they can be their authentic selves at work. Inclusion is not to be confused with diversity. Workplaces can be incredibly diverse without being inclusive. In some ways it’s easier to foster a culture of inclusion in a virtual environment, as there are less opportunities for people to feel physically excluded. But it’s still a challenge to create a culture of inclusion while working remotely. This course will help you better understand inclusion, identify the barriers, and highlight actions to take to make everyone at work feel included.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Yes, Zoom fatigue is real. You feel it as a leader and your team feels it too. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using for your video calls, constantly relying on video conferencing to connect with co-workers can become exhausting. During this era of remote work with restrictions on in-person meetings, more and more people report feeling drained and burned out. Scientific studies have shown there are four primary reasons why video chats fatigue us. In this training session, we identify the reasons why and explore strategies to help you avoid video fatigue and still maintain connections with your team.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
A question many companies are facing is how to maintain their company values when they’ve transitioned from a traditional office environment to a situation where some or all of their staff working remotely. How do you communicate culture to new employees who aren’t in the office to share the experiences of their co-workers? That’s why it’s important for organizations to recalibrate and evolve their culture to align with the realities of the virtual workplace. As a leader, this course will help you determine how to leverage your company’s core values to create a new and cohesive culture for your team.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
In virtual workplaces, one of the biggest challenges for leaders is determining how to work with their teams without micromanaging. What are the checks and balances you must put in place to determine that your employees are working, meeting deadlines, and being productive? Hybrid workplaces can provide the flexibility to work irregular hours and operate in different time zones. This course looks at techniques and tactics to ensure collaboration without limiting workplace flexibility. You’ll discover how to put processes in place to ensure the ongoing well-being, engagement, and satisfaction of your employees.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Blending face-to-face workplaces with virtual ones presents its own set of challenges. It’s often the case that remote workers feel out of the loop and disconnected from their peers. This is exacerbated by the fact that face-to-face employees tend to get information before their remote colleagues do which results in a feeling of us vs. them. In the face-to-face environment, it’s easier to make connections and form teams. For remote workers, it can take longer to build meaningful connections. There’s also the concern for employees that if you’re less visible you’ll have less opportunity to move up the corporate ladder. It’s important for leaders to maintain a balance between the in-office and virtual workers so that one group doesn’t feel they’re getting preferential treatment over the other. This course will help you identify strategies to manage a variety of work formats and styles and create a successfully blended working environment.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Uncertain times such as we’re dealing with during this pandemic can be difficult for leaders. Often, you’re being pulled in multiple directions. You’re busier than ever with seemingly endless meetings. You’re dealing with your own stressors and you’re finding it hard to stay on top of everything with all the distractions. Our coaching will help you cope with the challenges and stresses of a packed agenda, transform your patterns of behaviour, and develop new habits to support increased focus and productivity. The coaching will help you take responsibility and control of your workday, and actively influence the process and outcome of all meetings. You’ll learn how to be mindful, regardless of the distractions around you, and set healthy boundaries to be fully engaged in the moment.
As a leader, are you able to cope with disruptive changes while still maintaining your focus and energy level under stress? How emotionally resilient is your team? Our coaching will help you tap into your strengths and resources to rebound from challenging situations in your daily life. You’ll also uncover strategies to support your team members by providing them with a safe space where they can talk about their challenges. You’ll gain insights that will enable you to be a coach to them so they can also learn how to tap into their own resources in a more effective way.
Bi-directional empathy is the ability to connect with your team members and manage downward while also recognizing and relating to what’s going on above you. Empathy is an important skill that helps leaders effectively support their teams. It’s a muscle to flex. Our coaching will show you how to flex it more effectively. You’ll uncover your own approach for empathy and how to create a safe space for your team members to communicate what’s going for them so that you can connect in a way that’s real and valuable for them.
To acquire honest and meaningful insights, you need to ask the right questions in the right way. We’ve identified four pillars that can help shape your approach to conversations: presence, empathy, awareness and action. Our coaching will help you discover how to ask questions that will help the person reflect and gain some perspective on their issue or challenge. You’ll practice asking about sensitive topics without feeling like you’re prying. You’ll also learn how to ask questions from different angles to trigger a response when people are unsure of how to answer.
You’ll leave every session with an actionable, personalized plan, focused on overcoming obstacles to ensure rapid change and sustainable momentum. This program is designed around four one-hour coaching sessions scheduled over a four-week period.
Adapt your management style based on the needs of your hybrid team.
It’s clear that the hybrid workplace is here to stay. What’s not clear for managers is how to deal with the challenges that come with a hybrid workplace. A recent KPMG Canada survey found that 81% of employees say their managers need to be better trained to effectively manage a hybrid workplace team.
Discover how to address both the challenges and opportunities to create the best hybrid workplace for your entire team or organization.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
Gain strategies to ensure equal visibility and connectivity for your entire team
If you’re a manager, you know that the hybrid workplace offers attractive benefits for your staff as well as your company. But it also poses several challenges to be implemented effectively. Companies must be careful not to create a two-tier workforce where the in-office people get preferential treatment and better career opportunities than remote workers.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
As more remote teams transition to a hybrid structure, one question at the forefront of many business leaders’ minds is how to boost productivity in a hybrid environment. But hybrid workers can still face barriers that derail their productivity. As a leader your goal is to create a hybrid culture where your peers, senior management, your teams are engaged to do what they do best every day. It’s getting the results you want with less time and effort and shifting focus to what matters.
In this session, we will be looking at what makes a high performing and efficient hybrid team. We will delve into the 3 ingredients to build a productive team, mindset, reporting, planning and balance. We will address techniques to shift our mindset for greater productivity, provide you with recommendations for establishing effective reporting processes that will keep your staff accountable, and explore how planning and balance can push you further towards productivity.
During this session, participants will learn how to:
As businesses look to bring staff back into the office in new hybrid working arrangements, many leaders are questioning how to make these new workplaces successful. Recent studies show that employees have a new “worth it” equation, which includes when they go to the office and why they’re working in the first place. As a leader, how do you meet these changing employee expectations while also creating a productive and rewarding work environment?
This course includes two 2 hour virtual training sessions for team leaders and managers. The course is designed to help you identify the key issues for your employees and give you the groundwork to set up your team for success. You’ll take away actionable strategies and knowledge that will help you become a resilient leader capable of dealing more effectively with the new realities of the hybrid workplace.
In this two-part training session, participants will learn how to:
TOA Level One
The TOA is a highly effective tool for preventing team dysfunction and im-proving team productivity. The TOA sets out expectations, norms for acceptable and unacceptable behaviours among the team members, and the mechanisms by which team members will hold each other accountable.
Set up your team for success with this powerful collaborative session. Giving them the opportunity to work through this together generates buy-in, guides the team’s actions and interactions, and provides a reference tool the rein-forces valued behaviour. Imagine how much better an experience it can be for your hybrid teams to be unified and working with purpose, clear about their team’s operating norms.
This session will take participants through the first four steps of creating and maintaining a Team Operating Agreement. After this program, we recommend all participants join in a follow-up session.
TOA Level Two
It’s easy to learn something new, but hard to make it stick. Trying to align an entire hybrid team and change individuals’ engrained behaviours requires ongoing support. Without accountability, respect, and follow through, there is a danger that more problems can brew under the surface.
After the initial four-step program, your team finishes creating their Team Operating Agreement(s) and puts it into practice.
After completing the follow-up steps of the TOA process, your team will have a solid foundation to grow stronger together. When team members take ownership of their agreements to ensure it stays current to changing needs and keep each other accountable, they can focus on what’s important for the business. High performing teams are committed to each other and reach higher together.
During this follow-up session participants will:
An integral part of learning new skills is to apply them to your hybrid work environment. All our customized solutions include this post-session webinar support. At the end of the program, all the participants get customized assignments to practice on the job. In this facilitated session, participants can ask questions that might have come up in their practice, plus share what worked and what didn’t work with the group. Group sharing is a powerful way to deepen the learning from their own personal experience, as well as that of others.
Uncertain times such as we’re dealing with during this pandemic can be difficult for leaders. Often, you’re being pulled in multiple directions. You’re busier than ever with seemingly endless meetings. You’re dealing with your own stressors and you’re finding it hard to stay on top of everything with all the distractions. Our coaching will help you cope with the challenges and stresses of a packed agenda, transform your patterns of behaviour, and develop new habits to support increased focus and productivity. The coaching will help you take responsibility and control of your workday, and actively influence the process and outcome of all meetings. You’ll learn how to be mindful, regardless of the distractions around you, and set healthy boundaries to be fully engaged in the moment.
As a leader, are you able to cope with disruptive changes while still maintaining your focus and energy level under stress? How emotionally resilient is your team? Our coaching will help you tap into your strengths and resources to rebound from challenging situations in your daily life. You’ll also uncover strategies to support your team members by providing them with a safe space where they can talk about their challenges. You’ll gain insights that will enable you to be a coach to them so they can also learn how to tap into their own resources in a more effective way.
Bi-directional empathy is the ability to connect with your team members and manage downward while also recognizing and relating to what’s going on above you. Empathy is an important skill that helps leaders effectively support their teams. It’s a muscle to flex. Our coaching will show you how to flex it more effectively. You’ll uncover your own approach for empathy and how to create a safe space for your team members to communicate what’s going for them so that you can connect in a way that’s real and valuable for them.
To acquire honest and meaningful insights, you need to ask the right questions in the right way. We’ve identified four pillars that can help shape your approach to conversations: presence, empathy, awareness and action. Our coaching will help you discover how to ask questions that will help the person reflect and gain some perspective on their issue or challenge. You’ll practice asking about sensitive topics without feeling like you’re prying. You’ll also learn how to ask questions from different angles to trigger a response when people are unsure of how to answer.
You’ll leave every session with an actionable, personalized plan, focused on overcoming obstacles to ensure rapid change and sustainable momentum. This program is designed around four one-hour coaching sessions scheduled over a four-week period.
Leading a hybrid team can be challenging. Identifying the real issues can be even more challenging.
We’ve developed this FREE Hybrid Team Performance Survey TODAY based on decades of experience working with teams just like yours. Completing the survey will help you reveal some of the underlying problems that may be present for you and your team.
Once you submit your responses, you are welcome to schedule a complimentary 45-minute call. We can discuss your team strengths and the opportunities you have to build higher performance virtual teams so your business can grow. We want to make it easier for you so we’ll also continue to support you with tips, tools and resources delivered to your inbox.
