Hybrid work has been a tough transition for leaders. It’s no easy lift to overhaul how your workplace functions while still maintaining day-to-day operations and meeting your targets.
It’s been a big transition for us at August as well. Even as a firm focused on agility and experimentation, we’ve had our share of challenges in trying to keep up with the relentless change and unpredictability of the past two years.
But adaptability has always been a core strength for resilient companies. So we created a playbook to help leaders not only keep up, but to anticipate changes, plan new strategies, and maximize your unique skills in new ways.
The key to making hybrid work successful lies in your capacity to adapt your operating model to fit how your teams work best in this new environment. The end goal is a model that allows everyone to contribute and thrive, no matter who or where they are.
No small task, huh?
But consider that this has always been a big task. Your previous in-person structure may also have been suboptimal for some of your employees. Which means hybrid work presents a huge opportunity to throw out the old playbook and find new ways of igniting engagement and output from your teams.
As you design the hybrid model that works best for your organization, you will face many choices. To help you organize your thinking, we’ve distilled these down into a few essential questions:
Based on your answers, your organization will probably fall into 1 of these 4 common models for hybrid work:
Understanding where your operating model currently falls is the first step in assessing its effectiveness and making adjustments. If something isn’t functioning as well as it should, perhaps there’s an element from one of the other models here that you incorporate.
Next, assess where your current hybrid model falls on these two axes:
Having worked with organizations of all sizes, around the world and across industries, we've identified a few practices that are especially helpful for each kind of hybrid model.
Here are a few plays from our Hybrid Work Playbook that we recommend focusing on:
For Decentralized models...
For Centralized models…
For Top-Down models…
For Individual Choice models…
We go into these tactics in detail in our Hybrid Work Playbook. Check it out for in-depth breakdowns of each play, and how they can help you optimize hybrid work for the unique needs of your company, your teams, and your employees.
Hybrid work doesn’t have to be a “necessary evil.” In this moment of change, we all have an unprecedented opportunity to optimize the work for everyone. Let’s make the most of it.