When we penned our perspectives back in January many of our clients were still working in a predominantly virtual way. We like to be optimistic, but we also know working effectively as a virtual team doesn’t necessarily make for a good hybrid team. We’ve learnt this the hard way ourselves, and most of what has been written against hybrid reinforces this point.
As we head towards the final quarter of 2023, we’re still consistently measuring a significant gap between how team members and leaders experience policies, behaviours, and expectations on all aspects of work. Each week we read a new article demonising hybrid work, or another organisation's mandate to have "everyone return to the office". As we anticipated at the beginning of the year, and as we have always believed, more people are likely to spend more time working from different locations and connecting to their teams, colleagues, and clients virtually more often than they have historically. Practically, this means more and more teams and groups of people work in hybrid ways, where some people are together physically, and some are connected virtually. Our clients who want to close the gaps in their people's experiences are finding the lens of activities can be a helpful tool on two key fronts:
We don't think mandates are fundamentally wrong, but we believe organisations that invest in supporting hybrid teams to do their best work are far better positioned in the long run.
At the beginning of August, we shared Part 1 of our reflections on the role of “Bold Experiments”. In this article, we share our views on our second perspective for 2023 – How to make hybrid work, work.
Senior Consultant, Sabrina Baronberg, has been working with WSCAH in New York (read more about their amazing mission), an organisation that throughout the pandemic remained a mainly in-person organization. However, the planned opening of a new distribution site challenged them to think about “how will people know when to work from where?" and "How do we maintain our team connection?” A series of ‘how we work hybrid’ workshops and trainings has helped them seize the opportunity, and understand the effort required, to be intentional about how they work together. They’ve discovered that ‘business critical’ doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, but much more consensus exists around what a ‘Team Connection Meeting’ means when it's effective.
Anna Jaike (we call her AJ), a Senior Consultant in the Netherlands, shared that in a recent client project, the municipal government of Zaanstad had timing on their side – a major building maintenance program coincided with the beginning of the pandemic and they asked us to help them in the process of developing their vision for a new way of working. She noted that in conversations with their leadership and projects teams, “the discussion was not so much about where people work, but more so about how they work and collaborate as effectively as possible with their vision as their guide.”
As the program has progressed AJ noted that like many clients, navigating uncertainty is a main challenge for them; “People tend to want to skip the uncertainty phase and quickly create a sense of normalcy. When leaders want to quickly create a sense of normality, they often focus on answering obvious, logistical questions that give them that sense of control."
While leaders should be equipped to provide direction and answers, we also know that leaders and teams who can work through uncertainty have a distinct advantage - real agility. We continue to support organizations to build leadership and team competencies, but we’ve doubled down on ensuring our clients can create communities where leadership development is fostered through structured spaces and moments to share and reflect on their experiences with their peers.
We still believe strongly that the lens of activities is a time-tested framework to do this – it offers an approach to look across teams, functions, and people to build a common language. We’ve believed in this approach for over 30 years and have seen repeatedly that those who have embraced ABW (Activity Based Working) have a built-in agility and resilience to weather the massive paradigm shifts that rock our economies with increased frequency.
We have seen some organisations invest in building leadership capability to better support hybrid teams, while others are more apprehensive, hoping it won’t be an issue, or choosing to put other priorities first. To these latter organisations, we’d remind you, great hybrid leadership skills are great leadership skills, full stop. The underlying foundation of how leaders and teams build trust, communicate consistently and clearly, and foster connection will always be valuable; only that with hybrid work we've lost the physical-space-related crutches we’ve leaned on subconsciously for so many years - the water-cooler has been doing the heavy lifting for too long.
Our final set of reflections to round out this mid-year update – What is the role of data as we guide organisations towards more sustainable working strategies? Work-style data is not about explicitly measuring how much time anyone is spending on each type of activity – we know work is not that perfectly planned, nor does micromanaging individuals work lead to long-term, positive work outcomes – but rather we’re curious about how effectively activities are supported in a whole range of work scenarios. No one-size-fits-all approach here; whatever your organisation's chosen approach, we see time and time again just how critical it is that individuals, teams and organisations are intentional about their solutions and policies, and data is the key to a more informed and balanced perspective.
The enthusiastic uptake of Chat GPT has brought the workplace implications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) into the mainstream imagination. We are currently working with clients in Big Tech and Higher Education to further explore this (future research is in the works on this!). We are focusing our attention on the possible implications in our day-to-day working lives and how it will inform workplace strategy on both the individual and organisational levels. We use work-styles (activity profiles) to help clients think about how AI might change the types of activities they will do and the proportions they will do them in - this is an exciting new area we will be exploring.
Even those clients who are not currently considering a move to an activity-based way of working are using our analysis of their work-style data to great effect. We have helped clients work though their hybrid policies irrespective of their overall strategy, ABW or otherwise. For example, leveraging our Ways of Working Survey, we can understand the type of activities staff prefer to do when at home vs. when they are in the office, and the level of support for these activities. Individual preference is important, but qualifying how supported different activities are, and which are essential to driving team effectiveness is enabling our clients to have more pragmatic conversations about the tensions of empowerment and accountability, preference, and performance.
With that, we look forward to the rest of this year, and we feel confident that our perspectives for 2023 are guiding us and our clients in the right direction. In a world where we can easily feel constant turmoil and change, there is something reassuring in seeing our thinking weather the storm and test of time – like most things we think being consistent, learning and adapting with intention (and data!) will serve us and our clients more than a whole list of trendy new ideas.