Managing remote or hybrid talent involves many considerations. It's crucial to set clear objectives, build community, provide learning opportunities, promote work-life balance, utilize technology, and include them in decisions. These practices have helped me in fostering engagement, productivity, and satisfaction among my remote and hybrid team members. "The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team." – Phil Jackson

The key amidst constantly and ever-changing work dynamics is 'ENGAGEMENT'! In my experience, engagement is directly proportional to how motivated the employee base is. Whether the talent is working remotely or from the office - is immaterial if organisations don't engage enough. Consistent connect sessions with talent and giving them satisfaction- they're not alone; they're being heard, noticed and taken care of will take the talent management policies places. We humans are essentially social animals, we thrive under conditions where we meet and greet people, and converse over a coffee table - from there to working from anywhere, can be quite unnerving for most of us! This makes engagement an even more important aspect of HR.

Remote/hybrid work setup calls for a daily or atleast an alternate day catchup with the team to discuss the tasks for the day, current progress, etc. This builds a sense of togetherness and belongingness. Additionally, they must be updated with the physical events that happen in the company.

To foster a sense of belonging, it is key to have one on one with employees to understand their aspirations, how they like to be appreciated and set relevant work related expectations with them. When managers understand what matters to employee and employee understands what matters to the business, it helps both take steps at their level to find opportunities to support growth for both business and employee.

Another popular learning and development way is virtual knowledge sharing sessions to ensure that employees do not miss out on the opportunity of learning from one another even in a remote/hybrid setup. These sessions can cover the best practices within the team.

This can hold especially significant for working parents. Working mothers and fathers should be allowed to manage their work time as they can and it should be normal if one fine day, they want to have their babies be a part of the virtual call.

To ensure that quiet contributors are recognized for their work, use Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) by asking your team members who they go to for help and advice, who energizes and motivates them at work, who they see as outstanding, and who they are concerned about, and ask them why for each. This methodology has been shown to provide 90% more critical feedback and identify a massive number of unrecognized quiet contributors that go unrecognized from traditional manager ratings and cherry-picked peer 360's.

Motivating remote and hybrid teams requires fostering a sense of belonging through diverse communication and acknowledging milestones. Yet, balancing technology and authentic human interaction is crucial. This creates resilient virtual teams that are engaged and committed.