The hybrid

working blueprint
5 steps to make hybrid working work
for your business strategy
The future is hybrid
(and the future is now)
March 2020 marked the
dawn of a new era of work.
As employees around the
world retreated into their
homes, little did we know
that this would kickstart a
wave of innovation around
the fundamentals of how
people and businesses work.
The hybrid working blueprint
What’s become clear since is that there’s no
going back to the old work model. Employees
and businesses alike have seen the benefits
of taking a different approach. Like it or not,
we are now in a hybrid working world.
The good news? This gives organizations a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent the
way we work. In doing so, we can throw off
a tired, obsolete model and forge a more
productive, more agile future.
As most businesses are quickly realizing,
in this new world of work, where you work
is less important than the work you do.
But to radically reshape the workforce while
upholding your business objectives calls for
a nuanced understanding of the work itself.
This is what hybrid working is really about.
02
The future is hybrid (and the future is now)
So, what do we really mean by hybrid working?
There’s already evidence that when hybrid
working focuses on the work itself rather than
where it’s done, productivity and business growth
follow. But what is it exactly about hybrid working
that makes this possible? First, let’s look at what
we mean by hybrid working.
On a basic level, hybrid working is a way of
organizing your workforce by balancing time
spent in central offices with remote working,
whether at home, in satellite offices or in
“third space” coworking locations.
But when you consider the implications for
collaboration, innovation, skills transfer and
business continuity, it becomes clear there’s
a lot at stake in getting your hybrid working
strategy right.
Employees could be working in different places
at different points in time and that will likely
change on a week-by-week or even day-by-day
basis. This presents challenges for organizations
in aligning people and performance against
business strategy and objectives.
The hybrid working blueprint
The right time, the right place
Despite recent events, hybrid working has been
gaining traction for some years. This has largely
been down to employees wanting a better
work-life balance while businesses look to
reduce their overhead costs.
A recent study by LeadershipIQ found that
59% of employees say their work-life balance
improves when they’re able to work from home,
while only 9% of remote workers want to work
“in the office” all the time.
From a management perspective, global
research by Steelcase reports that 87% of leaders
around the world expect to allow people more
choice in where and how they work (a 38%
increase from April 2020).
We’ve known for some time that location is
no longer the determining factor for most work.
While the recent focus on hybrid work models has
been a response to challenging circumstances,
it has provided the perfect chance to embrace
the opportunities this approach offers to both
individuals and businesses. It’s shown that now
is the right time to redefine “place of work” and
move location out of the spotlight.
What does this mean for businesses? It’s time
to focus on how, not where, work is done.
Making hybrid working work
Of course, hybrid working is not without its
challenges. The reality is that it’s not enough to
simply convert physical interactions into virtual
meetings. Making hybrid work for your business
strategy, operations and employees demands
63%
careful organizational design using robust data.
So, in this guide, we’ll explore some of the
challenges we see and outline some actionable
of high-growth organizations
steps you can take to help you accelerate your
have enabled “productivity
hybrid working journey.
anywhere” workforce models
69%
of negative or no-growth
companies are still focused
on where people are
physically working
The Future of Work Report
Accenture
03
“We have a generational opportunity
to change traditional working patterns.
What we refer to as the standard five-day
working week will begin to change. And it
could emerge in lots of different forms.
Peter Cheese, Chairman
UK Government Flexible Working Taskforce

The hybrid working blueprint 04

Barriers to making
hybrid working work
When moving to a
hybrid model, it’s essential
organizations balance
their business strategy
with employee preferences
for where and how they
work. One without the
other is a recipe for failure.
Achieving this, of course,
is easier said than done.
The hybrid working blueprint
Organizations aren’t simply a collection
of boxes on an org chart. They’re complex
systems with many moving parts and
interdependencies, constantly changing and
evolving. Getting a grip on these systems
requires a detailed understanding of the work
being done, how it gets done and by who.
Designing and implementing an effective hybrid
working strategy for your business must go
well beyond basic policies that set boundaries
and guide behavior. It should be a blueprint to
inform your entire organizational design.
Hybrid working will change how your business
operates, how you attract talent and how you
profitably ride the waves of disruptive change.
Anything less will leave significant value on
the table.
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Five steps to an effective hybrid working strategy

At its heart, hybrid working is an organizational design question.

As such, your business will face many obstacles as you formulate,
refine and evolve your approach.
In our experience, there are five core steps that can make or break
a hybrid working strategy, each building on the previous one:

01
Developing a clear
understanding of what
a hybrid working model
would achieve for your
business and your
employees
02 03 04 05
Gaining a detailed Getting a clear view Understanding the location Profiling roles against In the following sections,
perspective on how your of all roles across your and time dependencies of these dependencies, we’re going to look at
organization functions in business, the core those activities so you can balance each of these steps in
practice, not just what it activities of each role business requirements turn and explore how
looks like on an org chart and how much time is and employee your organization can
spent on each activity preferences through achieve an effective
role design hybrid working strategy.

The hybrid working blueprint 06

“Success with a remote workforce, hybrid
or fully remote, requires operational
intentionality. Unquestioningly sticking
to systems and processes that made an
office-based model successful will doom
any remote model to fail.
Sid Sijbrandij
Wired

The hybrid working blueprint 07

Be clear about why
you’re going hybrid
Because hybrid working
has largely emerged
in response to easing
coronavirus restrictions,
it has tended to focus on
how to maintain business-
as-usual in challenging
circumstances. In reality, this
isn’t the best starting point
for building your strategy.
The hybrid working blueprint
Business-as-usual thinking tends to bring a
01
9-to-5 office-based mindset to a world that’s
leaving that way of working behind. Instead,
we need to think differently.
Rather than beginning with location, you should
start with the work. Because when you deeply
understand how work creates value for your
business, you can see how hybrid can improve
how work gets done throughout your organization.
It means you can focus more effectively on
the business benefits of making a change and
less on implementing blanket policies around
days spent in the office. This might lead to you
expanding access to the talent marketplace,
for example. Or it could be about improving
productivity by removing location dependencies.
Or even redefining your employee value
proposition in response to employee feedback.
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Step 01: Be clear about why you’re going hybrid
Building on success
The great home working experiment of the
last 18 months tore down many preconceptions
about remote working. Businesses were
pleasantly surprised that productivity increased
when they’d expected the opposite.
Sadly, they then began to discover the
reasons behind this were neither wholesome
nor sustainable. This set the stage for the rise
in hybrid working, an acknowledgement that
remote working was here to stay but that it
had to move on.
Many organizations now recognize that hybrid
working offers a way to capture the benefits
of remote working for employees but also make
it work for the business. What began as an
exercise in operational continuity has evolved
into an ambition to determine the best mix
of people, skills and capabilities to meet key
objectives and support business strategy.
The hybrid working blueprint
Getting strategic about going hybrid
At its core, hybrid working is about business
performance rooted in operational excellence.
It’s about:
> How you contain costs
“ The smart money in today’s highly
disrupted environment will flow to
> How you counter worsening industry-wide businesses that are ‘composable’ —
skills shortages
made up of interchangeable building
> How you ensure the right people are
working on the right things blocks that can scale up or down or
> How you determine what work can be swap out, according to the context.
done remotely or even be automated
> How you improve processes and better
A hybrid workforce model offers
serve customers exactly that kind of radical flexibility.
> How you get products to market faster
It’s this business-level strategic thinking that
7 Myths Standing Between
should be the foundation of your approach You and a Hybrid Future of Work
to hybrid working and everything that
follows. It needs to be clear, compelling and Gartner
communicated effectively to management
and employees alike if it’s to succeed.
09
Gain perspective of your
organization as a system
Despite the standard
use of org charts and
other schematics, many
organizations struggle
to get a clear picture
of their employees,
the work they do and
how that work supports
their business strategy.
The hybrid working blueprint
Even basic elements such as job titles can
mean different things in different locations
— a VP in the US may do the same job as
a director in the UK. So, when you begin
to look at specific activities in a particular
role, things start to get complicated:
> Are those activities being duplicated
or split across roles?
> Do employees have skills that
aren’t being used?
> Are senior managers spending
time on activities that belong to their
previous role?
Working out how to improve productivity
02
by streamlining work is complex. And
introducing place and time dependencies
within a hybrid working model complicates
things even further.
This level of complexity can appear daunting
at first. But if you want to ensure your hybrid
working strategy contributes to business
productivity, you’ll need to get into the detail
and start looking at your workforce data.
10
Step 02: Gain perspective of your
organization as a system
Examine your structure first
Begin by looking at the core structure of your
business. Understand the shape and scope of
your organization by looking at spans and layers.
How many layers do you have? Six or seven is
workable, nine or ten quickly becomes unwieldy.
What departments, divisions and subdivisions
do you have and how do reporting lines work?
These are the basics you want to get a handle
on first.
Understanding the span of control of your
organization is vital and will help you clarify
accountability. Because if ambiguities exist,
you can be sure a hybrid working structure
will quickly magnify them.
When interrogating your organizational structure,
spreadsheet analysis is no longer enough.
To get clear insights and make fast decisions, it’s
important to make your data as visual as possible.
You need to be able to show where you are
and where you’re going in a way that everyone
can understand and get behind. This is central
to effectively communicating what hybrid working
means for the business and it will have a
fundamental impact on your ultimate success.
The hybrid working blueprint
What shape are you?
Compared to a simple top-down org chart,
a more visual approach means you can
gain valuable insights into the shape of
your organization:
“ Ais major transformation in the way work
done will bring many complications
> Are some departments more top-heavy for organizations, from grappling with
than others? scheduling and how best to repurpose
> Do you have too many middle managers?
> Does the volume of entry-level positions
physical space to rethinking inclusion
make effective management difficult? and performance management.
By doing this, you can begin to see who is
contributing most to business performance, who Roy Maurer
the approvers are and who’s doing the work itself.
This will help uncover dependencies that could have
SHRM
a material effect on your hybrid working strategy.
This is important because it opens up the
opportunity to put processes in place that
will minimize workflow bottlenecks in a hybrid
environment. For example, time-critical decisions
shouldn’t be unduly delayed because the
approver is in a different location.
By gaining clarity into how the business operates
as a system, you can begin to plan what must
happen to take account of location dependencies
within your hybrid working strategy.
11
Get a clear business-wide
view of roles
Org charts will show you
the people you have, their
job titles and reporting
lines but they won’t tell you
much about people’s roles
and activities.
The hybrid working blueprint
Likewise, job descriptions will only give you
03
a partial view of what people do every day.
Yet this is exactly the data you need to make
hybrid working successful. It’s about how
productive work gets done and how value
is created.
So, you need to understand what defines
each role – its objectives, the specific
activities delivering value, and the skills
and competencies needed to deliver
target outcomes.
12
Step 03: Get a clear business-wide view of roles
Discovering what employees actually do
As we’ve said, to create an effective hybrid
working strategy, you need clarity on what
people do on a day-to-day basis. This can be
more complicated than it appears and you’ll
most likely need to integrate data from multiple
sources. But the result should deliver a clear
picture of roles, activities and responsibilities.
You can then explore which roles are strategic,
operational or tactical to help better align your
people with your business strategy. You can
go further to look at the relative costs of each
activity, so you can factor this into your hybrid
working plans.
This will show you who’s doing what, how much
time they’re spending on each activity and what
it’s costing the business, so you can map it to
value creation.
The hybrid working blueprint
Adding the where and when
Finally, you’ll be able to see where roles and
activities are currently being performed and when
each type of work typically happens. With this
insight, you can begin to optimize where and when
“ When thinking about jobs and tasks,
start by understanding the critical
each task would best take place.
drivers of productivity — energy,
If you can see which activities need focus time,
which depend on collaboration and whether that
focus, coordination, and cooperation
collaboration would produce better results done — for each. Next, consider how those
virtually or in person, you can begin to engineer
productivity at the activity level. This should then drivers will be affected by changes
roll up to deliver significant gains overall. in working arrangements along the
Spending time and effort on this step will give you axes of time and place
the level of granularity you’ll need to work out how
individual roles and activities fit into your hybrid
working strategy.
Lynda Gratton
Harvard Business Review
13
Understand location
and time dependencies
In many organizations,
there will be work that’s
dependent on a particular
location. Some industries,
like manufacturing, will
always be tied to physical
locations, as will others
where the work relies on
non-portable equipment.
The hybrid working blueprint
Often, activities will also be constrained by
04
time, such as customer contact roles and for
employees located in specific time zones.
Today, however, the majority of knowledge
economy work can be done at any time and
in virtually any location.
Even so, it’s important to recognize that
while certain activities can be done remotely
in theory, investment may be needed to
make this work in practice. You may need
to implement new technology or add a hub
location outside your existing property estate,
for example.
14
Step 04: Understand location and time dependencies
People aren’t robots
Be mindful though that this kind of assessment
shouldn’t be a mechanical exercise. Your people
aren’t task-completing units that can be slotted
into a rigid plan. Just because an activity can be
achieved remotely doesn’t mean the individuals
involved will want to work that way.
A knowledge worker with a home office may
have very different views to someone living in
a small, shared apartment with no dedicated
workspace. So, while it’s fundamental you base
your strategy on data, your decisions should
take into account both hard numbers and softer
human factors.
The hybrid working blueprint
The four levels of hybrid readiness
Once complete, your analysis will allow you
to categorize roles and activities by their
location and time dependencies. At a basic
level, you’re likely to identify the following
“ Inemployers
a true hybrid workforce model,
and employees agree
four groups:
that business objectives – the goal
> Those roles and activities that are not
dependent on location
of achieving the highest levels of
> Those that have partial location productivity and engagement –
dependencies are what determine where, when
> Those that could be made flexible with
appropriate investment
and by whom the work gets done.
> Those that are dependent on location
7 Myths Standing Between
Once you’ve defined all activities according
to these groups, you can look at the hybrid You and a Hybrid Future of Work
readiness of any role and compare this to Gartner
the preferences of the employees concerned.
Where alignment is good, you can begin
looking for optimization. Where there is
misalignment, you can consider what trade-
offs can be made and whether role redesign
is possible (see step 5). In the end, it’s about
balancing the needs of the business with
employee preferences and wellbeing.
15
Profile roles against dependencies
and adjust role design
Once you understand what
activities can be achieved
in which locations and the
roles involved, you can
begin to shape your hybrid
working strategy.
The hybrid working blueprint
No job exists in isolation. In almost every
05
position, role, department and division,
there will be many layers of crossover and
interaction. It’s why so many organizations
moving to a hybrid working structure
are focusing so much effort on adapting
their office space to encourage easy,
effective collaboration.
Of course, collaboration can only happen
if the right people can get together when
needed. This means that once you know
which activities are suited to hybrid working,
you’ll need to ensure people can easily
connect – physically or virtually – with their
team members.
16
Step 05: Profile roles against
dependencies and adjust role design
Finding the best-fit hybrid approach
For every organization, there will be different
ways of achieving an effective approach
to hybrid working. Each model will have
its strengths, weaknesses and trade-offs.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
So, it’s important you’re able to map out
different scenarios and approaches to
decide which one best supports your business
strategy. This may mean running multiple
what-if exercises to anticipate changes in the
business, workforce or market.
Importantly, you should be able to switch
between different scenarios quickly, so you can
compare changes and make faster decisions.
If you’re using slow, cumbersome spreadsheets
to do this planning, you’ll be tempted to go
with the first viable option at the expense of
potentially higher productivity gains.
Conversely, being able to rapidly model different
scenarios and quickly see the impact will enable
you to make more informed decisions and have
contingency plans ready if things change.
The hybrid working blueprint
Nothing stands still for long
Finally, your hybrid working strategy should be
open to continuous improvement by tracking
employee sentiment, business performance and
competitor response. It’s unlikely you’ll find the
“ Most people have been working
virtually for less than a year.
optimum solution from day one. And even the right
solution for today will need to adapt to changes in While that amount of time seems
the coming months and years. Like your business
planning, this work is never done.
substantial, it is unlikely that
employers have discovered the full
So, you’ll need measures in place to monitor
whether your approach is delivering for the range of opportunities that virtual
business and its people, whether roles need work provides during that period.
to be redesigned or augmented and to ensure
your hybrid working strategy supports longer-term
business planning and goals. Gerald C. Kane,
Rich Nanda and Anh Phillips
MIT Sloan Management Review
17
How orgvue helps you make the move
to hybrid working with confidence
In this blueprint, we’ve While there are many ways to plan and
implement hybrid working, businesses
outlined the main steps often default to old-school spreadsheets
and simple org charts. For many larger
today’s organizations need companies, this can make the entire
to take to fully capture the process slow and cumbersome.
opportunities hybrid working That’s where orgvue comes in.
offers. We’ve shown how
you can create an approach
that works both for individual
employees and your wider
business strategy. But, of
course, the real challenge
comes in making it happen.

The hybrid working blueprint 18

How orgvue helps you make the move
to hybrid working with confidence
The orgvue difference
Our organizational design and planning
platform enables you to quickly make
connections between your business strategy,
the specific work that needs to be done and
the people who’ll need to do it.
It allows businesses the world over to
streamline the entire process of designing their
organizations to thrive in the modern world
of work and adapt to changing circumstances.
Hybrid working is just one example.
Put simply, orgvue will help you accelerate
your move to hybrid working with clarity
and confidence.
It delivers the insights you need to make
more informed decisions, removing data
inconsistencies between departments and
locations with drag-and-drop simplicity.
This means you can quickly compare like
with like, no matter how many employees
and locations you have.
The hybrid working blueprint
Create deeper engagement
With orgvue, you’ll be able to move away
from hard-to-read spreadsheets and begin
using intuitive visualizations that uncover the
issues and challenges your organization faces.
Visualizations that will help you communicate
the changes you need to make across
departments and reporting lines.
You’ll be able to view your organization through
many different lenses, giving you a greater
perspective on your business as a dynamic,
interconnected system (not a static org chart).
It means you can more easily align your
strategic business goals with your people’s
capabilities and the locations they use.
Planning your hybrid future with confidence
No two businesses are the same. What’s right
for one organization in a particular context may
underperform for another.
So, with orgvue, you’ll be able to quickly
plan across many what-if scenarios. You’ll
be able to test your organizational design
thinking using highly visual drag-and-drop
tools. All before you commit to any single
route forward. Once you do activate your hybrid
working strategy, you’ll be able to easily monitor
the effects of the changes you make. By using
the platform’s intuitive dashboards, you’ll gain
clarity on how the business, its departments and
its people are performing against the plan.
What’s more, you’ll be able to do this on an
ongoing basis, freeing you from traditionally
slow planning cycles that are often out of
date before they’re even published. Let’s talk
Ultimately, with orgvue, you can transform If you’re considering how to move
how you make decisions, model the future to hybrid working, we’d love to
with confidence and plan how to turn your show you how we can help you
organizational designs for hybrid working make the entire process faster,
into reality. easier and more effective.
info@orgvue.com
www.orgvue.com
19
About orgvue
Welcome to fearless performance design
When change is the only constant, unpredictability
the only guarantee and clarity is increasingly difficult
to achieve, how can you plan with confidence?
Let us help.
The orgvue organizational design and planning
platform has been developed to help you create
a fearless future.
A future where you can effortlessly see, design,
plan and monitor your organization.
One where you can quickly spot trends,
capitalize on opportunities and plan for
whatever comes next.
And one where you can engage the entire
organization in your strategy.
The result? No matter what the future brings,
you can ensure that every foot you put forward
is placed with total confidence.
Learn more at orgvue.com