How to balance a hybrid workforce of office and remote staff, according to the cofounder of a fintech startup who uses monthly in-person meetings to strengthen her team's connections

• Neocova is an early-stage fintech that is focused on providing the core banking technology that small, local financial institutions rely on to do business every day.
• Cofounder and Chief of Staff Lindsay Lockhart shared her best advice for how managers can effectively balance the in-office and distributed workforce that keeps business running smoothly.
• From communication to cadence to co-location, here are three insights leaders should remember when working with a hybrid team.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Community banks and credit unions don’t exactly call to mind a picture of fintech innovations or virtual teamwork.

But one St. Louis-based startup is bringing cutting edge tools to Main Street banks and using a hybrid workforce of in-office and remote staff to do it.

Neocova is an early-stage fintech that is focused on providing the core banking technology that small, local financial institutions rely on to do business every day.

As cofounder and chief of staff for the company, Lindsay Lockhart is tasked with making sure her team works successfully across a pair of offices in St. Louis and New York, as well as with remote employees.

Lockhart shared her best advice for how managers can effectively balance the in-office and distributed workforce that keeps business running smoothly.

“From day one, we’ve always operated from the mindset of having multiple teammates that are not all in a centralized location, so what is the best way for us to work together as a team?” Lockhart said.

“It’s a way of life for us,” she added. “We don’t know any different.”

Keep the buzz going online

“First and foremost, over-communicate,” Lockhart said. “Assume that no one knows anything, so everybody stays on the same page.”

The Neocova team are heavy users of tools like Slack and Google Hangouts to keep everyone connected and talking throughout the day.

Specifically, Lockhart recommends using twice-daily check-ins for project teams to stay on top of tasks and assignments.

“Provide two touch points — one at the beginning of the day, one at the end — so your teammates know where you are,” she said. “Like most successful relationships, it all comes down to communication.”

Establish a cadence for your organization

Closely tied to the priority on communication is finding what Lockhart calls a cadence for the schedules and routines of your team.

In addition to the twice-daily check-ins, Lockhart organizes a monthly all-hands week at the main office.

“Those who are not in the St. Louis office come to what we call all hands week, and that is a hyper-speed, high-energy week of one on one meetings, company-wide face-to-face regroups, where we align and re-center for the month,” she said.

With people organizing their lives around these occasions, Lockhart said she feels a solemn responsibility to ensure that no-one feels like their time is being wasted.

“As leaders, if we don’t make sure we maximize that face-to-face time that we have — which is becoming more and more sacred — that is really where I see the morale and the emotional rot within a team and that is incredibly dangerous,” she said.

Working together is different from working next to each other

Neocova’s team is still fairly small at the moment, so there is a lot of important interaction and collaboration for each member to be a part of.

Looking forward to when the company grows and assignments become more specific, Lockhart said that it’s important to think about office spaces as being more than just a place to plug in your laptop.

“We should also be making sure that we were building up a team that would be connected to one another in that space,” she said, envisioning a purely hypothetical third office for the Neocova.

It wouldn’t make sense, Lockhart said, to hire one data engineer, one client specialist, one AI head, and someone from digital.

“It would be a very disconnected team dynamic,” she said. “We’d want to make sure that we were planning around the proper team dynamic, even in terms of role and functionality. That’s super key for us.”

Still, Lockhart said the process of striking the right balance is an iterative one that requires frequent adjustment.

“Every time you add additional team members, especially at the pace and clip that we have grown, you have to recalibrate and you have to look at what is working and what is not working,” she said. “What was successful last month may not be successful this month.”

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