Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping teams and organizations create better working experiences in service of

better results. I've been hosting this show since January of 2020, which means about 15 minutes

into my tenure, I, like all of you, watch the world of work

kind of turn upside down. We have all learned a lot over these past few years, and many changes

seem to be here to stay, including the reality of hybrid work. And while many organizations

are doing hybrid in some form at this point, I'm talking to a lot of

teams who wish their companies did it just a little bit better. So let's take a step back today

and reflect on some of the things we've learned about what makes hybrid work work better.

The first is clear expectations. Setting clear expectations for one's team has always been a leader's job.

But if we're honest, back in the day when going to work generally involved putting on pants,

a leader could get away with a little bit of blurriness. Like as long as the whole team had a general

sense of where a project was headed, that was enough to get started.

Because when you hit a roadblock or a point of uncertainty, you would just pop into someone's office or cubicle and ask a clarifying question.

Like someone would be working on the client presentation or the inventory plan or the patient care survey and they were pretty

sure they were on the right track. But hey, why not just peek over that cubicle wall and get a second

opinion from a colleague? We took that old peek over for granted. And what I'm seeing today is that

that same someone is working on the pitch or the plan, and they're pretty sure they're

on the right track. But there's no one sitting just over a cubicle wall. And that uncertainty,

it just doesn't seem to warrant a slack message or a text or an email, so they just run with it,

but sometimes they run in slightly the wrong direction. What we all need to understand

about hybrid working is that many conversations, even the casual ones, they take more planning,

...