You have the technology to support flexible work styles – everyone is laptop- and mobile device-enabled. You might even be the visible sponsor, the ‘poster child’, for flexible and ‘new’ ways of working.
You want the benefits of agile or ‘Activity Based Working’:
- Massive space consolidation
- Individual and group productivity
- Flexibility in your ‘stack’ – the ability to move people around the space easily
But these challenges keep confronting you:
- Remote working, and perhaps remote management, is leading to teamwork issues
- Unstable, inconsistent communication practices are leading to trust problems
- Unclear and unmet expectations have led to disengagement
If anyone asked, you would say you support flexibility. You even promote it amongst your team and encourage them to do the same. Why isn’t this visible support from you enough to make it happen?
Maybe it is. In rare circumstances, your organisation might be primed and ready for a more flexible work style and will suffer minimal downsides in trust, teamwork and culture issues.
Buf if you hear comments like this, your organisation is clearly not one these rare cases:
“I never know where my team members are”
“It’s getting hard to know what people are really up to”
“We’ve got to do more things to stay connected.”
“New people are leaving us, fast, we’re not doing enough to keep them.”
“I think we need to review our flexible work policy.”
So how can you prime your organisation to make the most of your workplace flexibility? How can you achieve the upsides – savings on space, improving individual and group productivity – and keeping that organisational flexibility? And how can you be sure to minimise the downsides?
We ‘wrote the book’ on this: the Transformed Teams flexible workplace framework was published by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency as its key advice to employers creating flexible workplaces.
Since writing the flexible workplace framework we have continued working with flexible employers to maximise the upsides of their flexible workplaces, offering recognised tools and frameworks to help them succeed. We have evolved our flexible workplace framework and tools to suit the needs of the modern workplace.
The fastest way to erode the benefits of agile / activity-based workplaces is to have the perspective ‘people + technology + workspace’ = agility. This simple formula is simply not clever enough to make agile workplaces hum. There is too much that happens between each of these elements that is not accounted for – they interact, and create complications you won’t be ready for if you view this problem as a simple one.
We can show you how to recreate the magic of the water cooler and reconnect people with your flexible workplace.
Make contact by expressing interest in an Information Call. At minimum you will get ideas about what to do next in your situation. Schedule an Information Call today to find out more.
