🌿🧭🌳 OD81: How do you create better hybrid work setups? (Explainer)
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Dear readers,
Making hybrid work looks to be one of the big organizational challenges of the '20s, with an impact on all disciplines & functions that support the performance of the organization.
We’ve created an in-depth explainer for all of you who are actively working on creating better hybrid work setups.
Hope you’ll find in it fresh perspectives, inspiration and tools to help you and your colleagues in this endeavor. This edition of the newsletter covers the key ideas (or TL;DR version) of the explainer.
TL;DR version of the explainer
The Links Model
The Links Model supports the perspective that looks at the organization as a living organism 🌿 that can be nurtured to find its way towards performing in any of the hybrid/remote/distributed/collocated work setups.
It’s a practical map of the “circulatory & respiratory” flows and links present in your organization, at 4 levels: employee, team, business unit/department and whole organization.
The Links Model is based on extensive research: 1400+ curated resources about Hybrid Work & related topics, additional research from trusted sources like Gartner, crowdsourced insights from practice that explore 80+ ways to look at the Hybrid Work challenge and deliberate action research through our Strategy & Organization advisory projects.
One of the specific challenges of designing better hybrid work setups is that both time and space are at play as key dimensions for all the interactions at work. Another interesting play that always happens is between 3 types of work design: intended, emergent and perceived.
Principles and Approach
Clear work design principles can guide the whole Hybrid Work endeavour.
Our own work design principles are:
Time and Energy follow Attention;
Build on the Energy and what Emerges;
The Wisdom is in the Conversations enabled by healthy Links;
Performance and Culture are not done, they Emerge from the Interactions;
Links are Evolving rather than Transforming.
The practical Sense & Change Approach that we’re using is: Making sense of how the Links look like now in your organization; & (design work setups & experiments to increase confidence they’re fit for purpose); Changing and enabling various links in the organization to evolve.
Sense
There are multiple ways of “making sense of the now”. We’ve created tools that support both a diagnostic & a dialogic approach (Hybrid Readiness Index & Hybrid Work Conversations).
After making sense of how strong the links are now in the organization, at various levels, it’s a good moment to ask yourselves what links might need to be strengthened or weakened going forward. What would the organization and the people in it and around it need next?
& (Designing)
This is where designing comes into play - to find together & design ways to create the conditions for those links to evolve in the organization.
The essence of designing is: After having Clarity on Design Criteria, generate multiple Design Options and make Decisions on Ways Forward, enabled by Testing that increases Confidence that the design will be Fit for Purpose.
Core design criteria are: Desired Outcomes, Constraints, Principles and Test Criteria (see the living room redesign example).
Given the complexity of the challenge, it’s useful to inspire & equip everyone to become better at designing their work setups, along the lines (boundaries) set by a central decision-making unit, which focuses on designing such setups at the level of the whole organization. Relying only on a centralized approach will most certainly fall short of creating setups that are fit for purpose for the whole diversity of individuals, teams and business units/departments in the organization.
In our experience and research, the most overlooked level and, at the same time, with the highest potential of impact in having an organization that performs in a hybrid/remote/distributed/collocated in office work setup is the Team - the key connective layer between individuals (and their performance) and the whole organization (and its performance).
Change
We’ve created, been using and recommending practical tools that help changing & evolving links at every level:
Team Level: Team Chemistry, Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping, 6D of Negotiation, Maps of Behavior Change, RRRICES Prioritizing framework;
Organization/Business Unit Level: Lifecycle of Organizations, Maps of Behavior Change, Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping, Organization Snapshot, 6D of Organizations, RRRICES Prioritizing framework;
Individual Level: Personal Strategy, Information Flows, Dynamic Stakeholder Mapping, 6D of Negotiation, Maps of Behavior Change, Designing Work Weeks & Days.
Find details and examples in the in-depth explainer and, if you find it useful, please share it with other people around you, who are also working on creating better hybrid work setups.
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This newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi,
creators of ForBetterOrgs.com, with the aim to inspire and equip people all around the world to build better organizations better.
For this purpose, we’re creating and offering premium learning products & experiences like masterclasses, bootcamps, long form essays, self-paced courses and avant-garde formats like mega maps, interactive guides, annotated reports, dynamic books, reflection apps and visual museums.
Sense & Change is our local advisory business, partnering with visionary Tech companies in Romania to help them address their most complex strategic & organizational challenges.