Employees no longer see work the same way that they used to. Smartphones and the Cloud mean that work doesn’t need to be done in an office. At the same time, employees are increasingly valuing time away from work and living a life on their terms. As the lines between work and personal lives blur, and employees demand greater control over their lives, it’s important for HR to take a step back and think, ‘are our people still working in the best way possible?’
HR should consider examining how individuals in their organisations work and restructuring to allow their work to be done in the most effective way. Andrew Warneck, Human Capital Advisory Services Partner, Deloitte commented, “It is becoming more and more important for organisations to think about how they are shaped. From the way that teams interact to the design and layout of the physical space where people work, HR needs to think about how that brings people together and how that fosters new ideas and innovation.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2017 Global Human Capital Trends, a study by consulting firm Deloitte, researchers found that 88% of businesses believed that transforming their operational structure to better reflect the way that work gets done in the future was a highly important issue. It’s HR’s job to facilitate that transformation.
“It is becoming more and more important for organisations to think about how they are shaped”
Team-based work is the future.
The first port of call is to look at the organisational hierarchy. Individuals no longer work— and no longer want to work—in a pyramid-shaped hierarchy where each individual labours separately and is directed by instructions from their line manager. A far better structure reorganises employees into small empowered teams. The role of leadership is to assign goals; the role of the teams is to accomplish those goals in the best way possible. Instructions still come from the top, but leadership facilitates work, rather than directing it.
Spotify is a great example of a business which practices this, with developers being placed within ‘squads’ of around 10 individuals, which are organised into ‘tribes’ of anywhere between 4 – 15 squads. While a tribe is as a whole responsible for a particular project, each squad is fully autonomous and accountable for its own features, with results measured through internal reviews and customer feedback. Crucially, each team has the power to make its own decisions. If a team member thinks of a better way to code something, they don’t need approval from a manager—they just do it.
Squads have no formal leadership, encouraging staff members to take the initiative. This not only facilitates creativity within each squad—keeping Spotify's offerings at the top of the market—it improves employee engagement by giving them control over how they respond to challenges. Personal growth is promoted through regular retrospective discussions in which squads identify ways to improve on their work. Staff with similar roles are also organised into ‘chapters’, groups that facilitate skills development, learning and the sharing of best practices, to ensure continuous growth.
The organisational structure of Spotify is so effective because it encourages its employees to be pro-active instead of waiting for instructions, limiting interventions from middle management. This offers a further opportunity to make the organisation leaner—with empowered staff, the need for many middle managers melts away.
Warneck identifies decision rights as central to Spotify’s success. He explained, “Their teams have all the power and decision-making authority they need to get things done. What slows people down, and stops them from getting things done, is a lack of decision-making authority." Recognising this, organisations like Netflix and Golin have done away with unnecessary rubber stamping by removing their holiday policy. Staff can take as long as they want; allowing employees and their managers to focus on their work, rather than worry about leave arrangements. In a similar move, Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) recently removed its expenses policy. Staff are given a credit card with a limit and are allowed to spend what they need without getting any approval. The result of ‘no-policy’ policies like these is that decisions are made more quickly, and dynamism and agility begin to rise.
"A leader’s job is to identify problems; an employee’s job is to solve them"
Accountability
Of course, this doesn't mean that employees should be allowed to run wild with freedom. The leadership of the company must establish clear boundaries, as well as a clearly defined strategy and purpose for each team. Objectives should be set, and employees should be trusted to reach those objectives in the best way possible. Spotify famously spends huge amounts of time aligning and clarifying its objectives before launching into a project, so that teams know what’s expected of them and the scope of their powers. This divides the labour of a project in a highly effective way—a leader’s job is to identify problems; an employee’s job is to solve them.
The key is transparency. Goals, results and feedback should be open for all to see. This has the effect of encouraging employees to take ownership of both successes and failures. While success should obviously be celebrated, so too should failure, since it offers a chance to grow. Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon wrote in his very first annual letter in 1997, "Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment." Tolerance of failure, with an expectation to learn and grow from it, should be baked into the culture of a company.
Where to start when identifying and rebuilding organisations in teams
Re-structuring an organisation doesn’t mean building from the ground up again. Within organisations, people interact in teams every day, many of which are unknown to HR or to leadership. Recognising this, companies such as Microsoft are increasingly using Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) to identify teams, tagging onto existing communication networks, like Outlook, to see who’s talking to whom. ONAs that can access data from diary and calendar systems can go even further, identifying how much time people are spending together, and which employees are the most sought after. When Cisco completed an analysis of its organisation, it found over 30,000 teams that it didn’t previously know about.
Knowledge of existing teams informs HR and allows them to make small but effective changes to organisational structure. For instance, a new project could be facilitated by expanding the scope of an existing team or legitimising an informal team that has been identified, rather than creating a new one. Decision rights can also be more effectively assigned. Individuals who are constantly having to go through a manager to get approval for their actions could be given the power to act by themselves, increasing organisational efficiency. By supplementing the work that already gets done within an organisation, speed and efficiency can be attained without drastically changing the nature of what employees already do.
“Provide a new generation workspace”
Look at your workspace
HR also needs to think about whether the physical space where employees are based really provides the best way for employees to work. For example, in industries where collaboration is encouraged and teams are frequently created and reformed, is a divided office the most effective layout?
Workspace analysis has for some time suggested that employees tend to work better when they have a degree of control over where and how they work and companies such as Deloitte and Société Générale have acted on this by implementing flexi-working models. For example, both companies have recently taken the opportunity to redevelop their offices in Hong Kong to accommodate hotelling, which better reflects their agile working style. Tony Jasper, Partner, Deloitte commented, “We wanted to provide a new generation workspace which responded to the changes in our employee base. This wasn’t just about how the environment looked and felt, but was primarily driven by a desire to achieve flexibility. Instead of a series of offices, we now have a wide variety of discussion rooms, quiet zones and open lounge spaces, so that employees can choose a place to work that allows them to get the most out of their time.”
Flexible working also tends to include options to telecommute—working from home—with the ultimate decision as to how frequently an employee works from home being agreed upon by the employee and their manager. It’s important to consider the value of coming into the office regularly. Employees who stay at home too often might miss out on team building opportunities, or struggle to develop contacts within their organisations. At Société Générale, telecommuting is limited to once per week, and employees can only begin telecommuting after they have spent six months at the firm building up their internal network.
“Whether an employee is working from home or from the office, there should be no disruption to the delivery of services to both your clients and your colleagues.”
The benefits of flexible working
By implementing flexi-working, employees are able to meet a wider range of their colleagues, and barriers to working with different people are removed. If a cross-functional group of employees has an idea, they are able to easily find the space they need to act on it. Jasper believes that hotelling in particular has had a positive impact on creativity and innovation, enthusing, "You find people are talking more, exploring different ways of doing things and finding different perspectives." Employees are also better able to work as individuals and can find workspaces that reflect their own work needs. Team rooms can be booked for group projects; quiet rooms can be booked when a little more focus is needed. As much as all of us in HR sometimes wish were otherwise, members of staff know themselves best and will choose to work in a way that allows them to get the most work done.
Flexi-working also further enhances engagement. Employees enjoy working in a space that suits them, whether that’s in a common area or at home. Flexible spaces also offer opportunities to help build a stronger sense of community—in Deloitte’s new atrium they’ve held birthday parties, talent shows, wellness sessions and blood donation drives.
Of course, effective use of office space is also a consideration. Hotelling reduces the number of empty offices, which lowers the cost of rent, and also reduces environmental impacts. With a smaller space, there is no need for so much furniture and so much energy consumption—it's easier to control the temperature of a small office after all.
Flexi-working is also future-proof. With more and more businesses relying on contingency workers, those with workspaces that are better able to quickly accommodate the ebbs and flows of employees are going to be the organisations that reap the most benefits.
IT takes two of us
The backbone of any flexible working arrangement is IT. Société Générale brought in a host of new IT systems, including digitising staff telephones and creating a WiFi network that employee devices automatically connect to. Deloitte uses a programme that allows staff to book workspaces up to two weeks in advance directly through an online system. Naturally, both companies still rely heavily on smartphones and laptops, so further enhancing the digital infrastructure for those existing devices was also crucial.
Matthew Clowry, Regional Head of Human Resources, Asia Pacific, Société Générale advised, “HR should work closely with IT to provide the proper IT set-up. Whether an employee is working from home or from the office, there should be no disruption to the delivery of services to both your clients and your colleagues.” He added, “IT has to ensure that the employee experience is smooth, regardless of where they are, because the job of an employee is not about figuring out technology, it’s about performing day to day activities.”
Ensuring that employees are able to work effectively has always been an evolving process for HR, and ensuring that employees can work flexibly is no different. HR can play a huge role in this, facilitating training or collaborating with IT to make sure that staff have the support that they need. At Société Générale they implemented ‘Coffee 2.0’, where IT staff are set up in pantry areas during lunchtime or mid-afternoon. This provides an opportunity for IT to touch base with employees during their breaks and make sure that they don’t have any issues with the new systems.
“Employees might not be able to see pictures of their family but they’ll get to see families a whole lot more”.
Building workspaces around employees
Change is always a challenge for any organisation, and resistance to new ways of working is inevitable. To minimise negativity, Jasper recommends that organisations include the workforce as a whole in the re-design process. Not only does this create a positive atmosphere for change, but it also gives opportunities for concerns to be addressed at an early stage and for staff to achieve the workplace dynamic that they want. For example, staff members who enjoy having their own office can be given the opportunity to book out workspaces for medium or long-term periods.
The space that is saved by reducing the number of offices can also be used to improve the quality of the work environment—a bigger and better fridge, art, plants or even open spaces in themselves can make a workplace all the more pleasant to be in. Of course, all this flexibility does come at a small price; personal effects like photos or mugs are no longer kept on desks but are stowed away in lockers at the end of the day. However, Jasper doesn't think this has had a negative effect on employees and instead sees it as a positive, observing, “Employees might not be able to see pictures of their family, but they’ll get to see families a whole lot more”.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
