New Ways of working – get involved in co-creating new ideas

We ran a “new ways of working” online networking meeting for 22 of our clients this month. There were people there from a whole range of industries and people from around the world.

The theme was to share learning amongst people who are focusing on new ways of working in their organisations. Some organisations were new to the process and others had been running major cross functional projects for several years looking at the skills, capabilities and infrastructure that their people need for the future.

All were interested in making some of the changes forced by COVID into something more sustainable for people in the longer term.

There were three major areas of interest (you could opt for more than one)

• 16 organisations were working on issues of remote, virtual and working from home
• 10 we’re working on matrix management to improve their ability to collaborate across the organisation and share costs in a tough economic environment
• 13 were focusing on agile working and digital transformation

It seems that the new way of working that is emerging from this period is, at the same time, remote, integrated and agile.

We then split into smaller breakout groups to discuss the challenges that we were experiencing collectively and identified 4 specific areas of common interest

1. Leading and working in hybrid teams where some people are working from home or remotely and others are in the office – what work should we do where, how do we organise schedules, meetings and maintain team productivity and healthy dynamics
2. Preserving wellbeing when working from home and in stressful times – focus on practical steps to maintain, mental, physical and social wellbeing
3. Balancing productivity with resilience / sustainable working from home, boundaries, habits and routines that deliver results and enable work life balance
4. Encouraging creativity and innovation when working remotely – how do we create the processes and practices needed – informal connections, boundary spanning, serendipity, remote ideation and innovation and inter- team interactions that spark ideas

We have set up workstreams on each of these four to include a number of our clients plus a content expert / facilitator / researcher from Global Integration.

As we have been working for 26 years on new ways of working on specifically focus on remote and virtual , matrix and agile and digital working we already have a lot of content relevant to these topics, but we want to make sure that the program are speaking specifically to the challenges being faced by our clients and continue to innovate, so we will co-create in each of these areas.

We are still interested in extending this collaboration to other leading organisations so if you are in an organisation working on new ways of working and would like to get involved please let us know. If you do get involved we would expect you to share your perspectives on what your people need and any useful resources you are able to share externally. In return we will share our thinking as we develop these topics further.

Please get in touch to let us know if you would like to get involved or to find out more about one or more of these topics