In today’s episode we interview Perrine Farque, award – winning diversity and inclusion expert and author of the book, The Successful Hybrid Team: What the Best Hybrid Teams Know About Culture that Others Don’t (But Wish They Did). Today’s podcast episode topics are focused on the “four pillars framework” for successful hybrid work teams: creating a unified hybrid leadership team, extreme transparency, overcommunicating through old and new channels, and unifying cross-cultural hybrid teams through cultural awareness.
Pillar #1: Creating a Unified Hybrid Leadership Team
Perrine discusses the importance of creating a unified hybrid leadership team in a remote work environment. Her model emphasizes the use of values to unify the team, the importance of role modeling, setting common goals, and scheduling informal time. The author cites the example of a Cisco CEO who used values to bring the leadership team together during a difficult time and set the tone for employees by role modeling the behaviors for the entire team. The author also highlights the benefits of co-leading and the importance of building connections by scheduling informal time.
Pillar #2: Extreme Transparency
The second pillar in Perrine Farque’s leadership framework is “Extreme Transparency.” Farque explains that she chose the word “extreme” to emphasize the importance of being transparent in order to create trust with employees. She talks about how transparency is different from communication, but the two are closely connected. Farque mentions that leaders can be transparent in various ways, such as embracing social media in an authentic way, demonstrating openness when sharing information, creating a flatter organization, and replicating the open door policy in remote work. Farque also shares concrete examples of promoting transparency, such as hosting open hours and encouraging all leaders and managers to the same.
Pillar #3: Over Communicating Through Different Channels
The third pillar of remote work is over-communication through various channels. It’s important to use multiple channels so employees can receive the message. This is especially important in remote work because people have different preferred communication preferences. Leaders need to act as Chief Reminder Officers to ensure every employee understands vision, goals, and specific job outputs. Over-communication can be a challenge for leaders, but they can obtain qualitative feedback from team members on their preferred communication styles and needs. The mental model for leaders needs to shift from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach.
Pillar #4: Unifying Cross-Cultural Hybrid Teams Through Cultural Awareness
Perrine discusses the fourth pillar of organizational success, which is unifying cross-cultural hybrid teams through cultural awareness. She highlights the importance of this pillar in today’s remote and hybrid work environment, where companies can hire talent from any part of the world. She stresses the need for leaders to promote psychological safety, understand language fluency and national communication norms, and be aware of cultural nuances. Furthermore, Perrine also emphasizes the importance of leaders knowing who is on the call, where they come from, and their norms. She believes this will help create a harmonious work environment and lead to a successful organization.
Who is Perrine Farque?
Perrine Farque is the best-selling author of Inclusion: The Ultimate Secret to an Organisation’s Success, and The Successful Hybrid Team: What The Best Teams Know About Culture That Others Don’t, and the founder of Inspired Human, a leading diversity and inclusion consultancy based in London. Perrine was also nominated in the Top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech by Computer Weekly and a Judge at the Diversity in Tech Award. Perrine helps organisations create inclusive and diverse workplaces that better attract, retain and develop talent.
During her career, Perrine observed that the most successful teams that work in a hybrid work environment (both remotely and in the office) follow a specific framework, either consciously or unconsciously. She described in her latest book this framework to build a successful hybrid team. Perrine helped many organizations become more inclusive and diverse including Amazon, Meta (Facebook), DHL and many others. Perrine’s work explores a new perspective to diversity and inclusion, in which business leaders think of diversity and inclusion as their top priority because it is the most important competitive advantage, rather than a moral imperative or the right thing to do.
- LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrinefarque/
- Twitter — https://twitter.com/PerrineFarqueUK
- Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/perrinefarqueofficial/
- Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/PerrineFarque
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