where boundaries dissolve

Solo#2: My Thoughts on Hybrid Work And How to Go About It

Episode Summary

Leaders are downsizing, reducing the office space, and trying to implement hybrid work, but are struggling to get people back to the office. Why? Because they aren’t paying attention to people’s needs, habits, and knowledge gaps with regards to hybrid work. People have new expectations and a different motivation towards the office and it's culture. Co-creating a hybrid space strategy, vision, and concept that includes change management is key to getting people back to the office. Here's why.

Episode Notes

Downsizing office space, repurposing the space, or implementing hybrid work concept are opportunities to improve collaboration. I led the change management for developing and executing the Hybrid Work strategy and concept at Siemens Smart Infrastructure's. Our team was to merge the global and European headquarters, downsize and repurpose the office space. Seeing this as an opportunity to improve how we collaborated, I needed to include the voice of the employees and apply an agile, human-centric  approach to change management to co-create the office space vision and solution, increase change adoption, and motivate people to go back to work. 

Here's why change management is critical to success and here's what to focus on:

• Make change management part of your hybrid work strategy and project team. The change team will act as a sounding board between employees and leadership, grow a change community, communicate, and create the change story to inspire people and help move people into action
• Develop an agile structure that allows for co-creation of the office space vision, solution, and change story
• Employee engagement requires regular communication on the change progress but also continuous communication on the vision. Use storytelling to inspire people on the vision
• Change ambassadors enable bottom-up change, but focus on enabling the frozen middle, management/team leads also. These questions may help:
  • Are there team leads that can be recruited as change ambassadors? What will you do about the other team leads?
  • What training and toolkits do team leads require to break down the change with  teams, "make the change actionable" ?
  • Teams will realize they have knowledge gaps to improve how they collaborate in a hybrid setting with, e.g. digital tools, or creative problem solving techniques. How are you capturing the knowledge gaps?
• Up-skilling requires more investigation, time and resources. Use the insight you gain from implementing hybrid work strategies to strategies on up-skilling your employees.

When done right,  hybrid work concepts / back to office strategies are opportunities to foster collaboration. But they're just the beginning. Fostering more collaborative work environments is a learning journey. Incorporating a change management team with time and resources will help you lay the right foundation. 

Connect with  me:

On Linkedin or Instagram , or visit my website for more inspiring change stories

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Hey fellow change enthusiast,

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Thank you for tuning in,

Helena