8 Strategies For Leading High-Performing Hybrid Teams In Clinical Research

By Kathleen Wisemandle, MSLOC, DOEC, principal and founder, Aspire to Grow Strategic Consulting and Executive Coach

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as clinical trial professionals (sponsors, vendors, and sites), we were quickly forced into a world of remote work — ready or not. We needed to keep up with the speed of clinical trial execution, build and sustain our teams, and adapt to the new challenges. Whether it was identifying and responding to changing needs from vendors, supply chain challenges, sites, patients, or staff, it all required a new way of working.

During a complete halt to in-person work throughout 2021, our employees and teams began to find a rhythm with remote work. We determined the right cadence for meetings, communications, and appropriate levels of collaboration and work time.

Beginning in 2022, we saw an uptick in organizations (regardless of industry) requesting employees to return to the office. We also saw the emergence of the Great Resignation, with employees seeking more work flexibility and realizing that remote/hybrid work was beneficial to them. Team morale and employee retention (perhaps a constant state of flux) and burnout were still common themes, according to the 2021 and 2022 Hey Kona Remote Manager Report. Current data from the WFH Research Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes indicate that while organizations may be averaging two days of remote work per week, employees desire more flexibility, including more work-from-home days.

So how might the biotechnology industry continue to build innovative and collaborative cultures with an intentional strategy for high-performing hybrid teams focusing on clinical trial delivery?

Let’s consider the learnings and opportunities afforded by the pandemic to create highly performing hybrid and virtual teams, and how we might continue this success while creating a new environment for productivity, flexibility, and employee engagement. While hybrid and virtual teams will vary in how frequently they work on-site vs. remotely, there are learnings that support moving forward with in-person meetings.

Inspired by our global cross-functional biotechnology team that increased portfolio growth, launched new clinical trials, and submitted NDAs during the pandemic and the research of Mitchell and Brewer, Leading Hybrid Teams: Strategies for Realizing the Best of Both Worlds, here are key strategies for hybrid team leadership we can consider in the clinical trial ecosystem.

1. Clarify A Team’s Purpose

The pandemic afforded us the ability to build our team with a greater pool of talent unrestricted by time zone or location. As we continue to optimize hybrid processes, knowledge sharing, and collaboration, it’s critical to reclarify the team purpose and goals. This seems obvious, but anchoring our teams and leaders in our purpose helps remind us of our “why” and remove our old ways of working (the “how”) that may no longer serve our patients in this new working environment. Our clinical sites were working differently; our patients had new and diverse needs.

2. Establish A Flexible And Effective Work Environment

Employees value remote workplace flexibility, according to Hey Kona’s Remote Manager Report 2022, and claim it as a top criterion when looking at a new job opportunity. While Hey Kona’s report targets technology startups, many of the suggestions also apply to the companies working in the complex clinical trial environment. How can we use this preference for a flexible work environment to our advantage?

For many organizations, the pandemic left us feeling uncomfortable with a new way of working. We no longer interacted in the hallways with informal conversations or built relationships via team lunches or in-person events. We needed to be mindful to create these opportunities in the virtual environment at a time when we were also concerned with family safety and an upheaval in our ways of living.

What we found was a need to empower team members with the ability to do their work and balance their personal needs. For example, some of our team members needed morning flexibility or needed a break during the workday to accomplish personal tasks. By focusing on work product versus online availability, we found our employees were still highly engaged and still producing high-quality work products. In our experience, team members were highly motivated and gave their best to meet and exceed study goals, and they greatly appreciated the flexibility and trust we provided.

How might we continue to work with the flexibility employees crave while still having visibility of the work product, risks, next steps, and work progress?

Now, we continue to empower our employees by establishing boundaries for their working hours. We allow employees to work core hours and flexibility is offered to accommodate personal needs, as described above. We provide clear expectations on required deliverables. In addition, as leaders, it was and is critical to exhibit good work behaviors by working reasonable hours, using vacation hours, delegating and prioritizing tasks, and minimizing sending email messages during late hours or on weekends.

3. Communicate Meaningfully Within Predefined Channels

The pandemic taught us very quickly that email messages were not the most effective way to communicate. Intent and context can be lost in long message threads. Most employees experienced numerous email messages and overflowing inboxes (many of which were left unread or forgotten).

By necessity, teams found ways to minimize email communication by using specific channels within applications such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. These channels provide visibility of information by category (or channel) without the need to “reply all” in an email. Telephone calls could be beneficial for quick clarifications or purposeful meetings.

However, we did find that teams were increasingly frustrated with multiple different modes of communication for various undefined topics. Moving forward, teams are encouraged to use team communication plans to clearly state the mode of communication to be used for specific items to reduce confusion.

For example, email messages related to a clinical study task should be replaced with use of project planners (Trello, Monday, or Microsoft Team Project Planner, to name a few). Here, study details, action items, attachments, and/or tasks are included along with their assigned team members. These planning boards optimize action tracking and asynchronous work, including the ability to work across time zones and resourcing assignments.

4. Seek Employee Feedback To Improve Well-Being And Mitigate Burnout

Over the last two years, burnout has been the primary struggle for employees and happens at a rate of more than 75% of individuals in support and operational roles (The Remote Manager 2022). These teams were delivering on fast timelines while navigating the ever-changing, complex environment of the clinical trial ecosystem. Now more than ever, it is important for leaders to monitor the pulse of employee well-being and provide opportunities for improving health and wellness. These may include building healthy work habits, taking breaks, minimizing unnecessary meetings, and utilizing company-supported programs such as Employee Assistance Programs, Employee Resource Groups, or building in time for exercise or meditation.

We learned that employees benefited from leaders who consistently held one-on-one meetings with direct reports and skip-level employees to discuss well-being and work opportunities. Leaders shared that they frequently asked employees how they were doing, encouraged them to build focus time into their schedules, modeled healthy work behavior, and encouraged calendar ownership, including declining meetings that were unnecessary to their goals.

Since our frontline employees work directly with external and internal stakeholders, they also have the best insight into the constraints that impact clinical trial delivery or patient concerns. In today’s complex environment, these constraints are ever evolving.

5. Monitor Team Relationships And Create Opportunities For Sharing Information

Building relationships and cultivating trust were the biggest struggles reported by remote managers in the hybrid setting (The Remote Manager 2022). As a result, leaders should create intentional opportunities for team bonding at in-person events or via virtual team chats and connections. For example, study leads on my former team began a role-specific chat channel that spanned across the portfolio of studies and offered the opportunity for others to ask questions among their peers in a safe forum. They found answers quickly, and team members were committed to helping each other. This open communication also provided a way to share experiences, challenges, and wins.

As leaders, creating a psychologically safe environment — one in which employees feel safe to share ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without punishment or humiliation — is critical for sharing best practices, conducting conflict resolution, and sharing lessons learned. My previous team’s program portfolio grew rapidly during the pandemic. To adapt quickly, the teams shared lessons learned in real time in an effort to get trials to our sites and patients efficiently and with high quality. As a leader, I enabled this communication and created an environment for safe and timely communication. Without this psychologically safe environment, teams would not have the courage to openly share these learnings.

6. Schedule Intentional Synchronous Collaborations And Purposeful Meetings

“Zoom fatigue” proved to be one of the biggest workplace challenges brought on by the pandemic. But our team learned that this fatigue was more closely associated with meeting and email overload. Building intentional synchronous collaborations included establishing recurring weekly meetings or designated face-to-face meetings — but only at a frequency that is required to accomplish specific work goals. Those employees asked to return to the office for non-intentional collaboration did not feel empowered or trusted. Many in this scenario were often frustrated by being less efficient due to increased commuting time to attend virtual meetings.

We should be intentional with our need for meetings and frequently assess our meeting inventory. We should also empower employees to determine when on-site presence is required to meet the critical business and study goals. Consider which meetings could be replaced by technological tools or applications to provide information.

We should help our teams rethink meetings for when synchronous collaboration is required. We should be very clear on the agenda, the meeting attendee list, and the goals to be accomplished. If the outcome could be accomplished by asynchronous updates to a Microsoft Teams Project Planner or similar dashboard, consider canceling the meeting. If some meeting attendees are remotely located, ensure that all attendees are using the meeting technology tool to minimize sidebar discussions and build an inclusive meeting environment.

7. Recognize And Reward Teams — In The Office And At Home

The pandemic also made us rethink how we acknowledge team and individual accomplishments. The days of potluck lunches and doughnuts were no longer viable or inclusive for our remote staff members.

Now, we can build these celebrations into intentional face-to-face business meetings, while also building virtual celebrations for those members in different geographic locations. These can be as simple as acknowledgement messages, electronic badges, gift certificates, or thank you notes.

Organizations also can consider employing recognition systems that allow for reward points to be given by leaders or peers. These can be exchanged for products or services and are an additional way to build rapport across the team regardless of location.

8. Solicit Ideas For Professional Development And Training

While the pandemic left us unable to participate in person at industry conferences or training sessions in person, we are now finding ways to reinstate these for employee growth and development. As we move into a new normal, we should reconsider how employee professional development and training looks in this new hybrid setting.

While rethinking the ways we work, we received employee feedback seeking training opportunities for new IT collaboration tools and applications to optimize efficiency For example, our organization utilized Microsoft Teams. While many used only the chat functionality, employees wanted to explore more features to be used for asynchronous collaboration. In addition, we also can seek to understand new applications of current tools and training in ways that optimize their use.

With the new complexity and pace of work these strategies above offer flexibility and empowerment to keep high-functioning team members engaged and fulfilled while offering high-quality clinical trial deliverables. As leaders and organizations, we should be intentional with in-person events for key business activities, training, and team relationship building activities. We can optimize the use of asynchronous tools to make work deliverables and project tracking more transparent and also eliminate unnecessary email messages and meetings. These also make work visible and accurate for effective collaboration across time zones.

Lastly, with the disruption to our industry thrust upon us by the pandemic, we should consider new innovative ways of thinking about how old processes could be improved to provide work efficiency. How might we change our thinking on the ways of working toward our new hybrid environments? What tools and structures will benefit our teams? How are we managing our knowledge across the organization? Which ways of working no longer suit our organizational footprint?

As leaders, we are the key to building cultures of psychological safety, empowerment, and appreciation that retain high performing employees.

About The Author:

Kathleen Wisemandle is the founder and principal of Aspire to Grow, Leadership Coaching and Clinical Operations Strategic Consulting. With over 30 years in the biotechnology and pharma industry, she has built and led teams to strategically plan for IND through NDA for multiple therapeutic areas across all phases. She held leadership positions within Takeda, Astellas, AbbVie, and Seagen.

She currently provides fractional clinical trial strategic consulting services to small startup biotechnology companies and, in addition, provides coaching engagements with executives and leaders transitioning to new leadership roles within the biotechnology industry and beyond.

She earned her BS in biochemistry from Michigan State University, and she earned her MS in organizational change and learning from Northwestern University in 2020. She completed certifications in Designing for Organizational Efficiency in 2019 and Executive Coaching in 2022 from Northwestern University.