Evolving Skills for Hybrid Collaboration

"Back to the office" is a misnomer. Commutes are harder, seats are largely unassigned, and for many of us, interactions remain superficial despite our co-location. Proximity doesn't auto-spark collaboration. In fact, with geographically-distributed teams, most of us face the continued need for hybrid meetings which exacerbates divides rather than bridging them.

And the reality is, since the pandemic corporate training has not evolved much; it still doesn't provide much remote or hybrid skills training (if any). It seems there was an assumption that these skills would develop "just by doing."

Work has evolved. Our skills must too.

Workshop design for everyday interactions

One path forward is to apply workshop design to everyday team interactions. This isn't about flashy exercises or sticky note walls. It's structured collaboration: you define outcomes first, pick the right participants, select activities that fit the context, and adapt them for remote, hybrid or in-person delivery.

Teams I've coached used this approach to shift from passive meetings to active working sessions. For instance, they reserve meetings for true collaboration and push status updates to asynchronous channels like shared documents or chat.

Shifting team culture

Instead of reserving workshop approaches for formal, high-stakes sessions, bringing them into everyday interactions rewires how teams operate together. When you design interactions intentionally, you’re also designing culture: who gets heard, how decisions are made, what collaboration looks like in practice and even how trust builds across distances. These aren’t isolated fixes — they compound over weeks and months into shared norms that define “how we work here.”

Hybrid inclusion as a cultural default. In hybrid meetings, it often feels like the people in the room are the meeting while remote colleagues spectate (a “meeting with an audience.”) Workshop skills can help flip that dynamic by teaching facilitators to engineer better interactions across the digital divide such as calling on remote participants first to share insights, rotating who controls shared digital whiteboards (like Miro or FigJam), using breakout rooms that mix in-person and remote voices, and layering in live document sharing for real-time input. Over time, this shifts the cultural signal from “proximity = power” to “contribution = belonging,” reducing the exhaustion of performative video presence.

Purposeful participation builds mutual respect. Workshop design insists on clarity upfront: Who’s the right group for this? What’s the single outcome? When teams adopt this ruthlessly, interactions happen with intention: status updates go async to Slack threads or shared Notion pages, freeing live time for active work and decision-making. This respects everyone’s bandwidth and fosters a norm where meetings are reserved for creating tangible outputs. The result is that teammates feel valued, not drained, by the end of the day.

Structured interactions reinforce broader values. By applying workshop design principles to regular team interactions, even casual check-ins gain intention: a 15-minute stand-up becomes a quick collaborative canvas update, blending information-sharing with problem-solving and rapport-building. Video stops feeling like surveillance and starts enabling connection. For example, colleagues can rely on paired camera-on discussions for vulnerability or async video updates for flexibility.

When teams stop treating workshop design as a facilitation skill and start using it as a cultural operating system, hybrid work begins to feel cohesive, not divided, and culture emerges from practices, not places.

Teamwork now demands deliberate planning and proactive design to be effective. Fostering workshop design skills empowers teams to create these collaborative experiences and help culture emerge from practices rather than places.

If these struggles sound familiar, consider what skills gap your team might need to bridge to thrive in this new normal.

Here are some additional articles to get you started:

• A Quick Guide to Designing Collaboration

• Building an Open and Supportive Team Culture Through Design 

• When Remote Workshops Go Silent