Hybrid work? Just go with the flow
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When it comes to hybrid work, businesses are preoccupied with where, when the question they should be asking is how. Specifically, how to create the conditions for people to do their best work.
This week, it occurred to me that an existing principle, with which many of us will be familiar, can help us answer this question.
Before I share it, though, let's talk about how we schedule our time. While this will vary depending on our role, level of experience, personal lives, and characteristics like our chronotype - how we perform at different times of the day - it's possible to break our work time into four modes: spontaneity (or unplanned work), collaborative, focused, and downtime.
SPONTANEITY:
Many people advocating the benefits of office-based working focus on the ad-hoc support received by junior team members throughout the day, easing them into working life through a combination of following the example of others and impromptu coaching.
Others highlight those serendipitous moments, like bumping into Sid from client services or Rita from the product team, when, after some initial pleasantries about the weather, together you have a brain-wave, which cracks that problem you've been unable to solve since the beginning of 2020.
While there's something in both of these ideas, the reality is never quite as straightforward. Real-life interactions can certainly be energising, but you could just easily describe the two situations outlined above as distracting and fanciful.
New tools like Donut and Coffee Roulette are, by definition, not spontaneous, but they do at least introduce the possibility of serendipity. Likewise, check-ins with team members, which, when regularly scheduled, allow everyone to ask questions and share insights.
Whether we're working virtually or in real life, the critical point is to consistently provide opportunities for unstructured conversations, which help build connections and support development.
Also, treat this mode of work as a chance to incorporate some flex into your work/life. As well as engaging with teammates, this is a good time to clear your email backlog and batch some of those small tasks that can otherwise sprinkle distractions across your day. Not, in other words, a chance to fill your diary with a bunch of pointless meetings.
COLLABORATIVE:
If you want to create genuinely valuable collaborative sessions, you need to instigate the following conditions:
The same goals: Everyone understands and is aligned with the session's objectives.
The right level of complexity: The challenge should be significant enough to engage everyone's full attention, but not so complicated that it makes achieving it impossible in the time available.
Full attention: Solving the problem requires everyone's attention. No taking a call mid-meeting, even from it's the boss, and certainly no responding to emails.
Equal participation: Not only should everyone's voice be heard, but the whole group should share a common language, meaning you need a relatively level playing field when it comes to subject matter expertise.
Open communication and close listening: You need to listen carefully to what everyone is saying. Collaboration is an opportunity to create new perspectives, not reinforce opinions.
'Yes culture': Constructive disagreement and divergent opinions are a natural and essential part of business, but in a collaborative session, it's far more effective to build on someone's point, not shoot it down.
Novelty and unpredictability: There are few things worse than when you feel like you're constantly covering the same ground. Ensuring that ideas are always progressing and introducing something unexpected can force everyone to pay close attention.
Blending egos and deep embodiment: The best collaborative sessions require us to leave our egos at the door. If the group trusts one another to find the best solution collectively, you create the potential for magic to emerge.
Control: We should aim for the right balance of openness to others opinions while maintaining the confidence that we can express our own.
FOCUSED TIME:
Some individual tasks are more cognitively demanding than others, and in these periods of 'deep work', you'll need to establish the following:
Clear goals: You need to know your specific objectives and what constitutes success - for you and your manager.
The right level of challenge: It should be difficult enough to push you without inducing anxiety, but not so easy that the task is boring - some people call this the 'Goldilocks effect', others the skills/challenge balance.
Complete concentration: No notifications, no social media, no emails, and no calls!
Intrinsic motivation: Focused, productive work is much easier if you care about what you're doing. At the very least, you should approach it with curiosity, but ideally, it is something about which you're passionate.
Autonomy: As you're clear about what is expected, you decide how to approach the task at hand.
Unambiguous feedback: Once you've completed the work, you need to receive clear feedback as soon as possible – what have you done well, and how can you improve next time?
DOWNTIME:
This bit is easy. Genuinely focused and collaborative work is tiring on the brain, and you need time to recover, so schedule downtime into your diary. Otherwise, something 'important' and 'urgent' will pop up. For more on this, read Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's latest article in Psyche for more detailed thoughts on establishing a deliberate rest practice.
Going with the flow
By the way, I haven't forgotten about the answer to the question of how. In fact, I've already revealed it. Because those moments when everything comes together, individually and as a group - come from being in flow.
Each of the characteristics I highlight above is a flow state trigger, and the greater the degree to which all of these are present, the deeper level of flow we experience.
(Steven Kotler)
What's clear is that as we design a new way of working - whether hybrid or remote - optimising for these triggers is vital.
- Do we allow daily opportunities for spontaneous interactions?
- Are we designing our collaborative session to optimise for flow? Who's in the meeting? Are we clear about what we hope to achieve? Have we established norms around interactions and distractions?
- Does everyone have the opportunity to incorporate focused time into their week?
- Critically, how do we encourage our team to have downtime, increasing the ongoing benefits of flow and mitigating the risk of burnout?
Flow can increase productivity by 500%, amplify creativity by between 400% and 700%, and improve learning rates by 490%. Perhaps it's time to move beyond a simple debate about whether we should return to the office, and think a little bigger.
Have a lovely weekend,
Ollie
(Stats above are from McKinsey and Steven Kotler’s Flow Genome Project)
✓
Any Other Business:
My podcast guest this week is author, publisher and coach, Alison Jones, who also happens to be the person who offered me my book deal - this tells you all you need to know about her esteemed reputation, so tune in to listen to us talk about how to improve your consistency and quality of your writing, whether the task at hand is a book, a blog, or a client report.
Alison also wrote this excellent recent article on LinkedIn on ‘Writing, resilience and reclaiming our space.’
The Economist neatly summarises many of the forces driving the ‘Great Resignation’ and shared three top tips to retaining your top people:
Gauge retention risk by conducting ‘stay interviews’ to find out what keeps employees.
Pull different levers to retain different types of people - e.g. benefits for lower-wage workers, and flexibility for white-collar employees.
As remote working makes it easier to both lose people and bring freelancers on board quickly, managers should plan for how to find new workers. Read my article about the growth of the contingent workforce, HERE.
Killer stat:
In a recent survey of large firms conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity, a research outfit, a majority admitted they did not have adequate data about the skills of their workers, making it harder to spot talent. A quarter reckoned that LinkedIn knew more about their workforce’s capabilities than their own firms did.
More buzz around the 4-Day week, including in this article in Forbes, and the New Statesmen’s interview of Atom Bank’s CEO, Mark Mullen, in which he explains why the challenger bank has reverted to fewer hours.
You can hear my podcast discussion with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on the subject, HERE.
There are a couple of interesting articles in Harvard Business Review this week.
The first explores some of the themes that relate to my article above, as the authors explore why, on average, managers either do not know or can’t remember 60% of the work their teams do.
The second discusses why remote work should be (mostly) asynchronous.
Emma Jacobs shares some interesting book recommendations on the future of work in the Financial Times, including one I’m looking forward to reading - Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Wurzel’s Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home.
More evidence on why we need to incorporate downtime into our schedule in this interesting article from McKinsey on ‘How to turn everyday stress into ‘optimal stress’’, which includes these fascinating charts.
And finally, a neat summary from Marcus Buckingham on the relationship between new policies and trust within your organisation.
