Hybrid Working: How to design workspace and time for productivity?

1. Course Introduction and Outline: Over the last two years, our understanding about the nature of work has changed considerably. Many organizations all over the world adopted remote work arrangements largely due to social restrictions implemented by governments in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Consequently, many people have benefited from more flexible hours and an end too long commutes. Now, as more countries begin to recognize COVID-19 as an endemic disease, governments are lifting restrictions and taking actions for organizations and people to return to economic normalcy. However, after working remotely for the past two years, employees want to retain that freedom and flexibility. For example, research from I, WG shows that employees are ready to forego ten per cent pay rise in favor of retaining the option to work remotely. According to this survey, seventy-two percent of office workers would prefer a hybrid way of working to a full-time return to the office, even if reverting to the old Monday to Friday routine meant earning more money. Likewise, in a global survey by Google workspace, over 75% of respondents believed that hybrid work will be a standard rectus within their organizations in the coming three years. Likewise, Accenture's 2021 Future of Work Study found 83% of workers preferred a hybrid work model over full-time in office or full-time remote. Research like these and many others point out that employees aren't keen on returning to RDS daily commutes. Instead, they want to lock in the work-life benefits and increased flexibility that's offered by the hybrid approach. As people expect hybrid work to be an option, corporate leaders are listening and responding. Early in the pandemic, many leaders did not see a need to change their policies. But now many expect to offer a hybrid model of work in their organizations. Therefore, a hybrid work model of in-person and remote working is here to stay as how work is done might never return to its pre-COVID state. If the future of work is going to be hybrid, it's critical to know how to plan and implement hybrid work arrangement in the organization. In this course, I'll guide you through some tips that will be helpful in this regard. First, I'll briefly go through the definition of hybrid work. Then the topic will focus and productivity, as it's important for hybrid work to help boost productivity, not reduce it. Next, onboarding to 0 is about how to plan about bringing the hybrid work arrangement into your organization. After this, I'll talk in detail about how to design office home in time to help you boost productivity. I will end this course with some points to consider when moving ahead with hybrid work arrangement in your organization. A warm welcome to my course. 2. What is hybrid work?: Hybrid work means a range of flexible work arrangements in which a person's work location and work hours are not strictly standardized. When we think about the most obvious way, hybrid work pertains to only flexibility around where we work. If an individual is working from home, office, factory or anywhere else. However, Hybrid is more than just where you work. In hybrid work, the time element is equally important. That is, whether or not work hours are flexible. Therefore, in order to design hybrid work properly, we need to think about two axis, place and time. At one end of the spectrum. I mean, in the bottom left-hand corner is a situation where everyone is in the office, let's say nine to five. So both time and location are prescribed before the pandemic, most of us were in this situation. Then at the other end of the spectrum is anywhere around the world at anytime there is no prescribed time or location. Very few organizations where in the top right-hand corner before the pandemic. And many experts believe that very few will stay there in future. Hybrid is anything that sits in the middle of that. This means that the hybrid workers location and hours of work must neither be completely fixed nor completely flexible. For example, a social media specialist who can work anytime at a cafe or by the beach, is not a hybrid worker. Hybrid work is between full in-person work with limited time flexibility and full remote work with complete time flexibility. Flexibility in both location and hours of work is a core part of the working definition of hybrid work. Proponents of hybrid work does believe that it can harness the best from remote and on-site models of work. For example, hybrid work allows employees the opportunity to carry out individually focused work at home or anywhere else if they feel they can concentrate better there. It also provides collaboration focused office space to ensure connection, knowledge-sharing and spontaneous and counters. All these are likely to increase productivity at work. So let's talk about productivity next. 3. Productivity at work: In conversation about hybrid work, most conversations seems to be focused just on giving flexibility to employees around how they work. But this narrative is not complete. But we need to make a case about productivity. The hybrid work arrangement has to boost productivity. Otherwise, it will be taken out of the organization. We all want to be productive, or organizations want us as individuals and team members to be more productive. So as we think about productivity, some of the questions you might want to ask might be what helps me and my team to be most productive in job? There are a number of ways to think about productivity at work. In this course, I'll follow Professor Linda Creighton, who argues that to be productive, each of us has to do four things. Be energetic, be focused, coordinate, and cooperate. We have to be energetic. In most jobs, people are more productive when they experience positive vitality and well-being. And their productivity is down when they're exhausted or stressed and they're working habits become unhealthy. We also need to focus. But particularly if it's a job that needs real concentration, you have to really focus on your own to get tasks done. I'm a course creator. So writing and making courses with focus is super-important for me. Beyond this independent aspects of work are those tasks that require teamwork. Some tasks demand substantial coordination with others. In this case, productivity will come from coordinating with others. When working on a task together, you need to coordinate who does what, make commitments to each other. But there's also a fourth aspect of productivity, cooperation sharing idea. There are jobs and tasks that require team to cooperate and actively share ideas in ways that enable them to ideate and innovate. Now, let's briefly look into what happens when these dimensions are productivity works. What happens when they don't? For example, when energy is there, you feel animated. When you feel burnout, you are tired. Likewise, you can concentrate. When you feel focused. Otherwise, you feel distracted. Similarly, effective coordination results in your team being goal oriented, not divided. Lastly, when you can effectively cooperate, your team bonds well. Otherwise, in fighting me arise. To ensure a hybrid work arrangement works for their employees and organization. Leaders have to build a context of place and time that increases productivity, not reduces it. In doing so, they need to consider sensitivity of energy, focus, coordination and cooperation to the place and time off work. Place in hybrid work arrangements normally refers to home and office. Working in an office boosts cooperation because it has a strong face-to-face element. But working in the office can also reduce energy if it involves a long commute and hours sitting at a desk. On the other hand, people feel more focused and energized at home because they spend less time commuting and eating healthy food. Working time can be synchronous and asynchronous. Working constraint in flexible hours helps coordination because colleagues, it can be easily synchronized. But it also reduces focus because focus needs a synchronous time. Working synchronously at office doesn't match to individual rhythms of concentration. As we move forward with hybrid working, we have to identify and map those trade-offs as they become clear. This helps to understand the main productivity drivers necessary for jobs and make adjustments in the work arrangements accordingly. Next, I'll talk how do we start to plan for a hybrid work arrangement in the organization? 4. Onboarding 2.0: Bringing employees back to office after around two years will be challenging for many organizations. They need to think about this as something like onboarding to 0. In order to motivate employees who have personally experienced the benefits of fully remote work, leaders need to offer a compelling rationale for introducing hybrid work models that include some degree of in-person collaboration. So start by communicating why hybrid model is important for both employees and employers. Don't forget to link them to your organizational goals. To make this communication effective, leaders should use data about their employees experiences regarding working from home during the pandemic. For instance, talk about what worked well and what could have been done better when working from home. Similarly, talk about what your employees missed the most about coming to office. If you don't have these data, conduct a short survey to gather those before communicating your intention to introduce hybrid work. But communicating the benefits about hybrid work isn't enough for a successful implementation. To make hybrid work function well, leaders need to understand about the core work and preferences of their employees. So talk to your people. This is crucial as competition for talent is intense. So creating any work arrangement that doesn't include the employees preferences can lead to employees leaving the organization for greater opportunity and engagement. So begin by understanding the individual circumstances under which your people are most productive. Some of the questions you can ask to your people to understand this revolve around uncovering the key sources of productivity where the employees feel most productive. What works should use, sued them the most? What are the sources of distraction? When in-person interactions are most effective and when virtual interactions are most effective. Answer to these questions can reveal hints about employees productivity and policy changes that could influence it. The next step is making your team understand the overall business goals to meet the customer's expectations. Once the goals are clear, teams can happily adapt their ways to reach them. Accordingly. Employees adjusted performance to match leaders expectations of the performance. People are influenced by expectations built upon them. This implies that positive expectations influence performance positively and negative expectations influence performance negatively. As implied by the famous Rosenthal experiment. Leaders should approach their conversation with an aim towards building, achieving business success. So some of the questions to ask and disregard can focus around understanding whether employees are clear about business and team goals, individual roles, performance metrics, and communication methods. After clarifying the individuals and teams goals, how they align with that of the organization. Next step involves developing a guideline and workable schedule that supports productivity. There isn't a one size fits all approach for the hybrid work policy. But having overarching principles will ensure equity and consistent planning across various teams in the organization. The teams will then have to interpret the policy for themselves in line with the organizations principles and needs. Likewise, shadows have to be set up for when people come to office and when they work remotely. The critical question then is how to decide upon which days a week they work from home and which days a week they get to work from office. There are broadly two ways to do this. First option is completely decentralizing this decision. Every team member gets to choose which days and how many days. This means. If you want to work remotely four days a week and only come to office and Fridays, you can if you want to work from office five days a week, you can. However, if choice is left to individuals alone, it could be a complete mix of people every day with who's in and who's out. So some people will think what's the point of coming in if other people that I need to work today are remote anyway, I might just as well stay at home. There are more problems when some people in the team work from office, while some work from home, it can generate what Stanford professor nicholas Bloom called Office ingroup and outgroup. For example, there's a meeting with eight people of which four are in the office and four are at home. Those in the office will get a conference room. They are like for small heads in one screen, the other for attending from home, our big heads and the other four screens, the people attending virtually you can see the ones in the conference rooms or whispering, but can't figure out what's happening. Then after any serious meeting, you know what happens? People in the conference room close their laptops, walk out and talk to each other. Probably go grab a coffee so you cannot escape really this in-group, out-group feeling. The second concern is the risks to diversity. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. Stanford research, it was found that among college graduates with young children, women want to work from home full time, almost 50% more than men. Similarly, people who are disabled, who live far from office, who can't afford a car, also have a higher preference to work from home more days than the others. On the other hand, single young men and women could all choose to come to office five days a week. And there is nothing wrong with that. But it implies that if the choice is left to open, It's not going to be random. Furthermore, working from home while your colleagues or in the office can be highly damaging to your career. Those working from home might face a very large promotion penalty. Many managers reveal that home-based employees in their teams often get passed over on promotions because they are out of touch with the office. Adding these up, you can see why leaving a complete choice to employees can invite problems. To counter problems from this first approach, Robert Paulson and Alexandra Samuel, authors of the best selling books remote Inc. Recommend a team-based approach to implement hybrid work arrangement. So each team member takes remote work days all at the same time. This can be agreed upon through discussion among team members and maybe other teams that the team work closely with. This approach could solve the scheduling problem about who comes when. For example, Apple started the pilot for hybrid working in February with a phased approach, welcoming people back to the office for one or two days a week, for an initial or four weeks. After this transitional period, they begin the pilot in full with eligible team in the office three days a week on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and with flexibility to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays. This approach means that individual employees lose their control over the days on which they can work from where. Moreover, if teams are involved in projects when developing work schedules, managers need to carefully chart out the project tasks and timeline and communicate to the team members. Projects should be organized such that independent tasks can be done at the same time and on the same days. Likewise, key phases of any project kickoff midpoint in finalization. When the team is in the office. For cross-functional project managers need to ensure that teams that work together in the project can have some days of overlapping the office for better coordination and cooperation. You can use organizational network analysis to map working relationships among people in multi team projects to answer questions such as who should come to office, which days? When in-person interactions among teams are most effective and when virtual interactions among them are most effective. Brief organizational network analysis is a structured way to visualize how communications, information, and decisions flow through an organization. Organizational networks consists of nodes and ties. The foundation for understanding how information in your organization is flowing, can flow and should flow. Modalities of hybrid work arrangements may change as people learn what is effective. Accordingly, leaders need to set expectations. That adjustments will be made through experiments and learnings. Once the hybrid CI deal is implemented, managers facilitate periodic team discussions on what aspects of the medulla working and not working. For examples. Supervisor could assemble the team once a month and ask questions around the benefits, difficulties and the adjustments required. Leaders should encourage recurring feedback and embrace policies as adjustable to meet the organization's needs. It's important to view the current state as an experiment that can be changed over time as business needs and circumstances change. 5. Recap and next lessons: Until now, I have talked about what hybrid work means and emphasized that for hybrid work arrangement to be successful, it has to serve as a productivity booster for individuals and teams. I outlined that when leaders plan to introduce hybrid work arrangement in their organization, starting point is gathering input from employees about their key sources of productivity and clarification of the organizational goals. I also touched upon some major ways to schedule in office and remote working days. I also pointed out that organization leaders and teams need to be open for adjustments as modalities of hybrid work may change in future. In the next lessons, I'll talk about how place in time the two components of hybrid work model can be organized to boost productivity. Particularly, I'll discuss how to design office to boost cooperation. Likewise, I will touch upon how to be imaginative about home to make it a source of energy for your work. Then I'll talk about how to use time as a tool to help focus and coordinate. Let's continue the discussion. 6. How to design office for cooperation?: The pandemic has caused us to rethink the purpose and meaning of office. And many leaders conclude that the office is a place for interaction, cooperation, and collaboration. That will mean most hybrid offices will need to be set up for cooperation and collaboration. Bland and spontaneous, open and private, from one-to-one to the whole office. Internal and client, face-to-face and remote staff for mentoring, brainstorming, presentations, and training. The next question then is how to start designing the office space to enable these? One of the ways to start can be rethinking about open plan offices. Typically in such a design, individual workstations are more open while meetings are held in enclosed conference rooms. If Office, but particularly the open plan ones, is only for putting noise, canceling headphones and working on your laptop. Why do we need office for Office has to be the place where you cooperate. You support each other, where you have collaboration, you have induction, coaching and mentoring. As people return to office from this pandemic, they are less comfortable gathering with others enclosed spaces. Therefore, meetings need to happen more often in open spaces that are flexible with no fixed features in the design so that they can adapt and change as new work patterns emerge. Traditionally, office architecture and furnishings are fixed and difficult to change. As we come to hybrid spaces, their main features, greater flexibility and mobility. Rooms become hackable spaces with movable boundaries that people can reconfigure to accommodate a specific meeting or a task, such as multi-person brainstorming sessions to private client meetings, to smaller spaces, can be merged into a conference room or vice versa. Likewise, create opportunities for your team to chat with and learn from people they haven't worked with before. Colleagues outside the regular network and other functions are called weak ties. Collaborating with the weak ties is vital for innovation because how we best access novel information, whether that's a new idea, access to a potential collaborator, or a new opportunity to make an impact. So design offices to maximize face to face conversation and enable serendipitous encounter with people from other functions. This essentially means lots of open spaces so that you can mingle and come together. It also means enhanced amenities and social facilities like cafes, fitness facilities, et cetera. These strengthened a sense of belonging and shared culture, encouraged cross-functional connections and chance encounters with weak ties. There is more in hybrid work arrangement. There will inevitably be someone who is remote regardless of how well teams coordinate their in-office days. So we need to also consider cooperation and coordination between in-office and remote workers. How can office space facilitate this? There isn't, of course, one of the shelf solutions to designing the office space for this. But some experts, such as Jim Cain and Todd hacer suggest blending digital and physical experience. As individuals and teams will continue to use video conferences for work. Office and technologies should be able to help create inclusive experience for those remote and physically present team members. For example, a best practice for a hybrid meeting is that everyone shows up with their laptops or iPads and they open them so that people can see all the chats that are coming in. And they can see you, and you can see them. People feel more connected as opposed to being set aside on a screen somewhere. Optimal conditions for video calls include state of art monitors, headsets and speakers in room microphones, easy to move, marker bodes and studio lighting. Besides cooperation and coordination, focus is equally important in the creative process. People need to quickly shift between working alone and together, and between more organized and informal interactions. Therefore, office spaces must strike a balance between openness and privacy, incorporating design elements that enable social interactions. This implies beyond space for cooperation. Office also needs more enclosures to provide different levels of privacy that people have come to expect while working from home. There may be quiet rooms or book cable desks for individuals to effectively concentrate and focus between meetings. And for those who can't or don't wish to work at, home. Video calls will happen everywhere. So enclosures, screens, panels and pods will give people places to focus and mitigate disruptions. You can even build video boots in a similar concepts like phone booths. You might be thinking this requires a lot of investment. So creating an office that fosters productivity on the hybrid work is out of reach for many small and medium enterprises. However, Joseph Carranza of the global design group or group, argues that even companies are small and medium enterprises without deep pockets, make an office a place of cooperation. For this, he suggests reducing small personal spaces and giving them back to co-operative space. Encouraging teams to meet in the open outside of meeting rooms so others can feel the bus and moving groups of people every quarter to new sitting so they can meet new people. Next, I'll talk about how to design home as a source for energy. 7. How to design home for energy?: In general, home is the place where you can be energetic. Long commute is a massive drain for many people. So home is the place of great advantage as people don't have to embark on a long commute to and from workplace. People are also then able to reassign their former commuting times. Two activities that boost their physical energy through exercise and recreation, and their emotional energy by spending time with family and friends. Many home workers are also boosting their energy by gardening, eating healthy home-cooked food, engaging in creative activities and establishing closer links to their neighbors. That said, particularly those with young children have found it tough to manage the boundaries between a worker and a parent. If warm working is to continue to be a source of energy in the longer term, it requires effort from both employees and their employers as a guide and creating a suitable home environment that fosters an urgent productivity. Let's hear from one of the pioneers, BTS first homework in trials where back in 1992, by 2 thousand, a significant part of its workforce worked from home. Dr. Nicola maillard, principle innovation partner at BT, compiled and extensive guide of tips for successful home working. Here, they are, create a space to work, whether it's a sunny spot in the house or a separate room with a door. You can close established routines that help you become more productive and embrace the flexibility than home working can give you. Switch off at the end of the day, keep healthy and don't feel guilty for taking breaks. Let others know when you are busy, free or unavailable, using status settings on your technologies. Connect with colleagues through informal chats. Virtual coffee breaks and happy hours. Make remote working less remote by using technologies effectively. Usage of video conferencing can increase more social conversations. But remember, some people may not like it or have sufficient bandwidth to use it. So open up audio channels as well. Culture and management style is essential to make this succeed. So employers can use communication platforms to build virtual team check-ins. Most important, they should focus on outcomes rather than being present in the office. This means developing processes for virtual performance management that includes regular team check-ins, one-on-one conversations, and monthly report to the management. Being imaginative about office and home isn't enough. We also need to re-imagine time as a productivity liver. 8. How to design time for focus and coordination?: Hybrid work arrangement also needs to consider flexibility around time, the duration when people are actively engaged in work for better productivity in hybrid work arrangement, we need to explore when to use asynchronous versus synchronous time. Broadly, in asynchronous time should use among colleagues don't coincide. While in synchronous time, the schedules coincide among the colleagues. Let's now talk about how asynchronous time can be used to boost focus. Any work that needs focus to be productive requires undisturbed time. So give employees a schedule that allows them to clock a fixed number of hours to focus. To boost productivity. Such asynchronous hours need to be aligned with the energy rhythms and work preferences. For instance, your particular employee may be able to focus on writing while having morning coffee at a local cafe. Another team member might prefer evenings to write a report, but some others might want to do that in the morning. Be sensitive to all those, allowing your people to define and control their time about when and how they work. For people whose jobs require focus as a primary productivity driver. Design asynchronous schedule. Your project management system might help in this regard. One way to use project management system is by breaking each piece of work into its component tasks, then figuring out the likely amount of time needed to complete each task. Next, bundle up that time into blocks of certain number of hours. After this, assign these blocks to team members, taking into account their work rhythms and preferences. For example, a task is to create a brief on recruitment trend of cybersecurity personnel in Singapore, you decide it's going to take around 25 hours of work for one week, then you can divide it into five blocks of five hour each. Let's say your team members say the maximum focus time for a task is around 15 hours a week, and they need to take a break after an hour of concentration. You can give one person to do three blocks and another two blocks while allowing these people to work on their own rhythms. When you work asynchronously, you also need to re-imagine how to share updates and reply to questions asked by others in the team. There are numerous tools available. For example, task boats such as Trello, Asana, monday.com, or base camp provide a transparent status of project tasks. Give a clear view of what our colleagues are working on and how much progress has been achieved. Users can leave comments and ask questions in a way that promotes asynchronous responses. Instead of the real time pull up email and instant messaging. Similarly, shared documents allow team members to work on the same document asynchronously. Simple tools like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper support in document annotation and team members tagging. I have talked about asynchronous time and how to design schedule to help people focus and work autonomously. There is more, there are jobs that require coordinating in real time on projects and with in the moment dialogue and feedback. Let's talk about that now. Typically, synchronized time occurs naturally because people are in the same place at the same time. When you're all doing something at the same time, it's much easier to coordinate. That's why offices were so popular because you didn't need to say to people, Let's meet here or there. You could simply walk around and coordinate your tasks, do in the moment coaching, or do team ketchups. But things are different now, technological developments have enabled the design of synchronized time that is placed agnostic. It's possible to create opportunities for fruitful real-time virtual interactions. Likewise, visual collaboration platforms such as micro and mural support both real time and asynchronous whiteboarding for brainstorming and strategy work. But to enable synchronous time, virtually, managers need to find a compromise between individual work styles and team needs. One way to do this is by making team agreements. Ask each team to create a set of team norms that define how they'd like to work together in a hybrid work arrangement, individuals can share how they work best. For instance, teams can schedule a meeting free days, or planned daily short meetings. Similarly, we need to end the indiscriminate booking of time in our colleagues, this calendar with little regard for their priorities and commitments. Office hours is a concept that can help in this regard. It was popularized by Cal Newport, author of the best-selling book, Deep Work. Essentially, it refers to a period of time that people carve out for meetings on a daily or weekly basis. Ideally, time slots are limited to 30 minutes. Apart from urgent or extraordinary circumstances. Work schedules are aligned with people's preferred work patterns. For example, early birds are best advised to block out there mornings for deep work. Whereas night owls are likely to do the same with their afternoons. There are tools to facilitate booking time slots by considering other people's priorities. These tools can also help to improve meeting efficacy. But remember, digital tools are only as effective as how effectively you use them. And alignment between managers and team members is important for any digital initiative to succeed. 9. Way forward: Hybrid work is here to stay. Leaders need to step up with strategies designed and technologies to make it productive for this adjustment in time in places needed, but don't move too fast. Test with pilot projects about time and space weather, the hybrid arrangement is actually going to work or not. Taking this approach can help reduce risk. It can also stop the leaders from making a major investment and discovering that this investment isn't the right one. Pilots can also help make decision-making faster and align people along the direction forward. However, conducting pilots won't be enough. As a leader, you need to test the pilots performance against some metrics or questions. The questions proposed by Professor Linda greater than from the London Business School can be useful in this regard. Number one, is this future-proofed in one to two years from implementation? Will it look, we have built something that doesn't work in future? Number two, is it going to support technological transitions? We will see, while technology does not destroy jobs, it definitely reshapes everyone's job. So leaders need to have upskilling and reskilling on the agenda. Number three, is it fair and just we don't want to see industrial disputes increasing due to the introduction of hybrid work arrangement in our organizations. For hybrid work arrangement to succeed, people at different levels in the organization have their role to play. The top management needs to build a narrative and be role models of the initiatives. Managers need to be up-scaled and engaged in decisions. They are the ones with whom employees have direct contact. So managers roles are important. Finally, employees need to be trusted and empowered. They are the ones who will have to live with the hybrid work arrangement. But remember, finding the hybrid solution that supports your organizational direction is going to be an evolving process for most organizations. And that path is going to look different for everyone. Having said that, if you are a leader of an organization, there has never been a better time to experiment with hybrid work than today. So start with the tips I've shared in this course. For more detail understanding, you can look into the books and articles that I have mentioned in the attached reference list. Good luck and thank you for taking this course.