AGILE HYBRID WORK FRAMEWORK
5 KEYS

1. PRINCIPLES

PUT IN THE TIME, PRINCIPLES DRIVE THE BEHAVIORS WHICH SERVE AS THE FOUNDATION FOR YOUR TEAM’S SUCCESS

Habits are fractal, occurring at individual, team and organizational levels. At their foundation, organizational habits are changed by individual behaviors. Behavior change is hard, which is a silver lining in a crisis like this – we find ourselves thrust into new conditions where running the old programs is unsustainable. Specially in phygital Agile environments.

What we call complacency is often a reflection of organizational habits (an accumulation of individual and team habits) unchecked by systems of work that have eroded over time into paths of least resistance.
Which is fine, until it’s not. We’ve all been disrupted by COVID-19, in many cases forced into new ways of working. Our old habits – individual and organizational – are rightly challenged to adapt. Traditional business models have long been the sacred cow, one that now point blank faces its shortcomings in how it has or has not promoted cross- functional phygital teamwork, customer focus, autonomy and agility. We reap what we sow.

The paradox of the crisis may be that the distance brings us closer. Closer to understanding what is critical and what is superfluous, as individual contributors, teams and organizations in service to our customers.

There are a lot of moving parts in the process of discovering, developing and delivering value to your customers. Working within a shared understanding of the guiding principles, your current systems will naturally reform and reinvent themselves to support your suppliers, teams and customers in unimaginable new ways.

If your current business model is not designed to support and sustain the impact of quarantine (if you’re experiencing disruption), use this guide and leverage this situation to reshape the way you operate phygitally.

Working ‘backward’ from the point of delivery to your customer reveals the critical path to the exchange of that value. In situations where the system is strained, you learn the difference between need to and nice to, shifting paradigms to put the customer’s needs first.

This disruption in routines we’re all experiencing will expose where your existing ways of working (processes, policies, procedures) have inserted bureaucracy and ‘waste’ (disruption in the flow costing time, money or rework), or where your organization inadvertently hasn’t put the customer first.

Rather than taking weeks to socialize and craft a declaration of principles, simply living them through your choices and actions will communicate them more impactfully than words ever could.

Decisive actions inherently communicate priorities which, when at the service of the customers, team and organization will organically cross-pollinate and permeate all aspects of the work, forming new cultural norms. Actions speak.

Current gaps between your proclaimed organizational principles and the actions of your employees can be traced directly back to the systems of work and management within the organization.

Enact your way into new behaviors

New behaviors are forming anyway- you can shape them, or they can shape the future of your organization. How leaders use mechanisms (tools, frameworks and systems) and leverage experiments to make decisions are the actions that model, shape, build and consistently reinforce the key behaviors supporting the guiding principles.

Embrace experimentation

To review, principles are not top-down mandates, deployed by management. They can not be in a phygital environment. Rather they are shaped over time through actions and priorities with the feedback loops that come with dialogue. Principles don’t exist in a vacuum, they have a context and relationship within the ecosystem of your company. To separate principles from values, habits and behaviors is to look at a single facet. Rather let’s practice system thinking, look at the whole, and recognize principles are a means to an end. The end in mind (with a nod to Stephen Covey’s timeless work on habits) is cultivating the individual and organizational behaviors that will deliver superior value.

KEY BEHAVIORS

Here are a few key behaviors to foster that will enrich your ability to bear fruitful remote digital collaborations:

  • Empathy
    Simple as it is, practice the golden rule, prioritize people over process & performance, give one another the benefit of the doubt: in every situation, teach or learn.

 

  • Transparency
    Let people know what is at stake, what is important, how their actions impact the bigger picture, where things are headed, how decisions are made, at all levels – always show your work.

 

  • Respect
    Respect is not only deference, it is also understood as holding one another to a higher standard- gently challenging all to think and act at our highest levels, with humility and a growth mindset.
  • A-synchronicity
    Finding the harmony in working independently together.

 

  • Value Differences
    Invite a difference of opinion, experience and perspective as a fortification of greater understanding. Use one another’s knowledge to (in)validate what you think you know. Culture exists because of differences- they are essential to our strength. Detach from the answer and learn to ask the question.

 

  • Living organism
    Operate within the ecosystem as a part of a greater, living whole. Understand how, why, when, and in what measure your function supports the greater purpose. Recognize that in order to live in the market, your company survives and adapts, needing a constant assessment and adjustment to the demands of that survival.
Demonstrating these is infinitely more useful than describing them (the map is not the land). Tune in to where these characteristics show up and where they need to, and incentivize these behaviors in the outcomes prioritized (we’ll dive into this next) and expectations you hold of one another in a phygital environment.

Integrity between your actions and words will matter as you model, seek out and highlight these attributes in your team. I once heard a leader explain that ‘transparency was really NOT giving someone the whole landscape, because they would be overwhelmed by options.’ That’s only a problem in an unprincipled, hierarchical, command-and-control organization.
Principles act as a homing device, a compass to help every team navigate complexity, to discover, align to the customer’s needs, and deliver the value they bring.

As your organization is seeking its new rhythms in this time of disruption, seize the opportunity to shape new behaviors. Through your own actions and those you recognize and reward in others, guiding principles will resonate and quickly pollinate across the company. This is the first key to forming a successful digital remote culture and building a Agile Hybrid Work Framework… and it begins now.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION

The ActioGlobal team recommends you to read “Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way” by Michael Hoseus and Jeffrey K. Liker.

New business challenges, unprecedented business perspectives.

Let's talk!

If you desire to shape the future, through Agility, Digitalization and High Performance then let´s make it come true – together.