Reset as you mean to go on

As the option to return to office working becomes a more immediate reality the window to deliberately define your go forward ways of working is closing.

This is an opportunity not to be missed.

A year ago businesses told us of their surprise and delight with how quickly their teams adapted to the challenge of remote working. From pretty much all in to pretty much all out. So far, so black and white. But ‘hybrid’ or ‘blended’ working is many shades of grey and getting it right is the real challenge and opportunity. Hybrid working changes more than where a desk and laptop are situated. It has a culture of trust, adult:adult relationships and mutual respect at its heart. This is a culture that many businesses were striving for pre-Covid and now the conditions to make it happen are upon us.

On average it takes 66 days to form a new habit – so in just over 2 months unhelpful old routines could return and become the norm or you could be well on your way to embedding new working practices that will deliver great results.

How can you grab this opportunity?

Define your future world of work principles

If you haven’t already done so, specify the principles that define your go forward model of work. Assuming it’s different from what you had in the past, engage a broad range of opinion formers to develop guidelines that underpin the principles, determining how teams across your organisation will operate and bring their best to work every day.

Get underneath people’s experiences and expectations

Fully understand the wide range of experiences people have had over the last 12 months. Both what they have loved and want to continue and what they have found challenging, and hope will change. This provides vital information about how big a shift is required to adapt to your chosen future of work

Refresh and reinvigorate your leaders

What mindset and behaviours do your future world of work principles require of your leaders? Align your top team on how they will lead hybrid working and role model the principles. Give them the opportunity to explore their hopes and fears, how they will work together to overcome challenges and make the most of the successes.

Freedom within a framework

Engage everyone in the principles and give teams support to implement them in their team. Provide team managers with conversation guides to engage their teams; exercises to help them explore the opportunities and realities of hybrid working; templates to make and record decisions about how they will operate day to day. See: New World of Work toolkit

Test and learn

Recognise that this is another new of way working. Some decisions and plans will work brilliantly, others may need to be tweaked and changed. The transition to hybrid working should be viewed as just that – an evolution into the new. Encourage everyone to test new ideas, learn from what works and improve what could be better. And add ‘learning culture’ to the list of benefits gained from taking a deliberate approach to your reset.

Never has there been such a great opportunity to reset your culture and working practices – seize the day and bring on your refreshed, high performance culture.

Get in touch

To discuss how to engage everyone in your chosen future of work and build your high performing culture call us on 01208 824 508 or at [email protected]

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