Work From Anywhere

The Essential Guide to Becoming a World-class Hybrid Team

Alison Hill, Darren Hill

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780730390879
• eBook ISBN: 9780730390886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Bring out the best in yourhybridteam with this invaluable resource

Work from Anywhere delivers practical strategies and actionable guidance on how to develop a high performing team and business in a remote and distributed environment. Accomplished authors, behavioural experts, and fast-growth business leaders, Alison and Darren Hill, show you how to craft business and culture strategies to bring out the best in your hybrid and remote team members by focusing on both performance and people.

You'll learn how to:

• Understand the unique psychology, methodology, and technology that makes hybrid teams excel
• Develop strategies for embedding high performance across your team, no matter where they're located
• Create rhythms and rituals to keep your team highly motivated and on task, and avoid disengagement

The ability to work from anywhere is no longer just a HR conversation, it is an Executive conversation. Perfect for business leaders working with hybrid teams, Work from Anywhere is also ideal for organizational development executives, cultural transition leaders, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are responsible for ensuring that employees consistently perform at their best, regardless of location.

CHAPTER 1
THE WORLD HAS SHIFTED
(shifting our world)

There's every chance you've got this book in your hands because of a question. Potentially, it's a question along the lines of, ‘How do we shift to work from anywhere?’ or ‘What does work from anywhere really mean?’ It's possible that you're contemplating, ‘Can it really work?’ It is also possible that it's no longer a question of ‘if’ your team can work remotely. This might already be a reality of your workforce and you're mulling over the big questions, such as ‘How do we make it truly work?’ and ‘How can I trust my team to work autonomously?’

These are all important questions. And they're the kinds of questions that some of the largest organisations globally (and the teams within them) are asking. For possibly the first time en masse in our economic history, questions about how we work, where we work, and what work actually means are being considered by all workplaces, regardless of size and industry. From the local coffee shop on the corner, to our financial institutions, to the likes of multinational tech behemoth companies, all businesses have been affected. Leaders across the globe are contemplating these same questions — and many have made long‐term commitments around work from anywhere (WFA) for their workforce.

The world has seismically shifted. Where it was previously considered ‘suboptimal’ to work away from an office, we are now seeing well‐known companies globally committed to a WFA approach into the future.

Organisations such as Stripe, Shopify, Facebook and Twitter across 2020 all declared significant policy changes, with a swing towards permanent or at least significant adoption of flexibility for their people to allow them to truly work from anywhere.

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, announced in May 2020 a permanent remote work policy that allows individual employees to make the choice about where they work and how.

Shopify CEO, Tobi Lütke, also announced in May 2020 they would embrace a remote workforce, claiming they were now ‘digital by default’. Lütke argued that for Shopify, their offices would become the place to support new hires to transition to remote working environments. For an organisation such as Shopify, with customers who mostly work from home, having employees working from home also will create a stronger empathy of customers’ experiences.

The lead taken by these types of organisations has seen many others follow suit, with major parts of our populations now working from either home, co‐working spaces or locations other than an office.

In fact, Nick Bloom from Stanford University outlined that in June 2020, 42 per cent of the US labour force was working from home full‐time, with only 26 per cent working at their business premises. The remaining were, at the time, out of work, a testament to the severe impact of the recession that flowed from COVID‐19 and lockdown measures. With almost twice as many people working from home, Bloom argues the US is now a ‘working‐from‐home economy’.

One of the most significant changes we came across in our research occurred in possibly the least‐known giant company on the planet, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). TCS is a large IT service company with a global reach. They have campuses across China, Hungary, America and India. This company had invested heavily into bricks and mortar — creating places for people to gather, collaborate, ideate and deliver work. However, in 2020 they made the decision that 75 per cent of their 500 000‐strong global workforce would work remotely within three years. This is a firm commitment to invest in the future of work in a different way, making the change not as a temporary response to a crisis, but as a chosen commitment to a long‐term strategy in the way of work.

In a focus story on their website, TCS argue that, collectively, forward‐thinking organisations are ‘on the verge of a new work order that will render obsolete age‐old concepts such as location dependency; defined and fixed working hours; high‐touch governance; and presenteeism as a prerequisite to optimal productivity’.

Is this just a rebadge?

Technology is a catalyst for change. It always has been. Since the first person who not only crafted a round object but also had the curiosity to see what would happen if they attached this object to something else to help move it, we have known that technology changes the way we gather, transport, connect and trade.

The advent of the internet, combined with the evolution of work devices that packed in solid speed and grunt alongside the ability to be used in a mobile fashion, meant that the way we work had been transformed. No longer are people tied to a location that houses a computer server (or industrial‐blend coffee sachets).

Remote work, flexible work practices, and the ability to work‐on‐the‐go are not new approaches. They have been a large part of the way we work for decades, allowing individuals with a range of requirements to access work in a way that works for them. But this does beg the question: is ‘work from anywhere’ just a rebadge of old practices and principles? Or did the rush to remote work expose just how far short of the WFA mark we were?

Policies and practices were grossly underprepared

The global pandemic of COVID‐19 provided two gifts (if they can be called that). The first gift was the global experience of how quickly change can happen when the purpose is big enough. For the past 10 years or so at Pragmatic Thinking, we've worked with organisations to drive change and craft impactful cultural shifts in organisations. We've worked on everything from shifting the safety culture, to shifting the leadership culture, and to driving a united culture across organisations that have grown rapidly through acquisition. One of the common pushbacks we get in this work stems from the belief that change takes time, particularly cultural change. We heard all too often that people are resistant to change; in fact, they simply don't like change. COVID‐19 and the changes to workplaces that followed, however, showed us just how quickly change can occur, and how swiftly people can adapt when they need to.

The second gift that COVID‐19 provided to workplaces is the realisation that existing flexible work policies and practices were grossly underprepared to accommodate the requirements of a permanent shift of teams to both perform and connect virtually; and yet, people still found a way.

The policies in place and tools available to ‘work‐on‐the‐go’ were all embedded in the belief that we'd reconvene back at ‘work’ (traditionally an office space) at some point and recalibrate, or get back to the ‘real’ work at some point in the near future. Working flexibility was a holding pattern of sorts — sure, some work got done, but it was never going to be as good as the work you could get done in the office.

Yet lengthy, enforced remote work clashed with this belief — and the productivity data in many industries suggested otherwise. In spite of shortcomings, many teams took big leaps forward in the early days of March and April of 2020 that might otherwise have taken years or even decades.

Making the shift to a WFA approach requires new tools and new processes. Transferring what works in an office to a distributed methodology and hoping that it'll still work is a recipe for disappointment.

Perspectives that needed to adapt

Working from anywhere used to be a concept that workers would have to try to convince their managers was a good idea. Truth be told, we had team members here at Pragmatic Thinking have these conversations with us over the years, and we pushed back. As staunch believers and advocates of organisational culture, we came from the perspective that decisions needed to be made based on ‘culture over comfort’ (believing that the request to work from home was about personal comfort over the collective team culture). Taken as an individual request, we could see the benefits of working from home, but we lived in fear that then everyone would want the same request. What damage might that do to the culture we'd worked so hard to build?

After the rush to remote working for our team, our perspective has now changed dramatically and irrevocably. And the study and exploration of how to adapt to this shift as a team is the essence of this book. If you feel resistance to this shift, or those around you...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• PROLOGUE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 THE WORLD HAS SHIFTED (shifting our world)
• CHAPTER 2 THE CALL TO ADVENTURE
• CHAPTER 3 CHARTING THE COURSE
• CHAPTER 4 TACKLING THE TOOLBOX
• CHAPTER 5 CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGES
• CHAPTER 6 SOURCES OF STRENGTH
• CHAPTER 7 SLAYING THE BEAST(S)
• CONCLUSION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT