When planning a team’s hybrid working model, you should consider two aspects of work: your operations and your projects.
Operations are your typical “run-the-business” activities that usually produce the same product or service and keep the business running. Most of your work falls typically here, and it includes things such as creating financial reports and providing technical support.
Projects are your temporary endeavors that typically have a start and end date. Projects create a new service, product, or result and are usually time-bound.
Here’s how to plan for each aspect of hybrid work.
Plan for Operations
Your operations will include the main portion of your hybrid work management plan. This is where you’ll consider the different recurring schedules, such as your weekly and yearly plans (that you assessed in the analysis phase).
Here are a few examples:
- Weekly plan: Three days in the office and two days from home
- Monthly plan: Thirty percent of the time in the office
- Quarterly plan: One day in the main office for quarterly business reviews
- Yearly plan: Four days every year in an off-site location
- Special plan: Work-from-anywhere arrangement for up to three weeks per year
Your team’s operations plans can include any combination of the above. For example, you might pick a weekly plan and a yearly plan. A different team might only implement a monthly plan.
You’ll also want to think through the details of each of those hybrid working plans. For example, if you settle on a weekly three-days-from-the-office and two-days-from-home plan, you’ll need to decide which days of the week to settle on. Will you ask your team to work Monday through Wednesday from the office and Thursday and Friday from home? Or would you want to alternate the days every week?
Similarly, if you settle on a thirty-percent-from-the-office monthly plan, will you predefine those days, or will you leave them up to each manager’s discretion?
Plan for Projects
Your projects will include hybrid arrangements that are more flexible than your operations plans because they’re at the project team and workstream level.
Each project can have different hybrid requirements, and project leaders can decide on arrangements with their teams and customers.
Usually, on-site work for projects is front-loaded. In other words, more on-site office work is required at the beginning to help kick off a project than is needed at the end of the project. This helps increase team cohesion early on through face-to-face interactions.
How to Roll-Out Your Hybrid Working Plan
When you roll out your hybrid work plan, start by looking at your operations plans first, and then work from the top down in your organization before moving on to your project plans.
Here’s a simple example of what that means.
Let’s say you have three levels of plans: a company-wide operations plan, a lower-level operations plan (e.g., your business unit’s operations plan), and a team-level project plan.
- Company-wide operations plan: A yearly three-day off-site in early December where the whole company gets together in a remote location for a one-day business update and a two-day team-building program.
- Lower-level operations plan: A quarterly two-day QBR (Quarterly Business Review) where team members in your business unit get together in the office for a two-day meeting every three months to discuss and review your team’s updates.
- Team-level project plan: A specific project that you need to kick off with a four-day visit to the office and close out a few months later with another one-day meeting in the office
After establishing those plans, you’ll prioritize from the top down to work around them. For example, your last QBR of the year (in your lower-level operations plan) might coincide with the yearly three-day off-site of your company-wide operations plan in December. In that case, you’ll prioritize your yearly plan and potentially combine both those events, having your own business unit travel a few days early and hold the team QBR directly before the yearly off-site.
Similarly, you can work around your project plan travel dates by prioritizing your two-day QBR in your lower-level operations plan so that the team doesn’t miss out on attending it.
Of course, you might have many other operations and project plans, but the idea is to plan it from the top-down and prioritize operations schedules over project schedules.
This is an excerpt from my book: Hybrid Work Management: How to Manage a Hybrid Team in the New Workplace
