How to design hybrid ways of working in a global company

The global pandemic brought uncertainty, challenges and constraints to companies and people alike all over. From a business perspective, those who adapted managed to thrive. Here at Manyone, we saw an opportunity to design and improve our ways of working that supported our growth without compromising on our strategic and creative output. We’d like to share our process in the hope, that you might find value in our approach.

Very few, if any, businesses were left untouched by the global pandemic in 2020. Overnight, a new reality dawned with companies forced to implement new ways of working to accommodate large parts of their employees working from home and things such as social distancing at the office for those still working there. The physical transformation was just one part, digital transformation had to happen at the same pace with companies having to adapt to remote-first solutions which could support collaboration from any location. Companies were forced to re-adjust and do it at speed to ensure that they didn’t lose their competitive edge. The challenge faced by most global companies was to stay both productive and creative while prototyping new ways of working. Ways that supported adapting efficiently to the unpredictable nature of the situation; learning what worked and what didn’t — on the go — and still ensuring cross-team collaboration across time zones and cultures.

At the outset of the pandemic, Manyone was already operating with a flexible and highly autonomous team of teams setup. As a growing global company, we already had several offices across the world, and each one of those had its particular ways of working and processes for cross-team collaboration. Some teams had even already embraced remote work per default while others worked entirely from the office — with a work from home day being the exception rather than the rule. However, a recurring theme across each office was a large degree of independence: we believe in empowering our teams to always be adaptable, and approach any challenge in the best possible way that emphasises strategic creativity in our process.

But like every other company, Manyone also had to adapt to the new normal and do it fast. The situation required a review and fast-forwarding our own digital transformation. But we also decided to do what we as a design company should do: document and analyse our journey to identify pain points along with innovations and moments of success that could give us the insights needed to optimise our ways of working: to funnel our insights into processes that could champion the best elements learnt during the past two years into an adaptable model that we, or any other company, can use today to an advantage.

During our research phase we found the following challenges especially present:

• The impact of change varied from office to office, and the same could be said of the solutions. Some worked in some places, and some didn’t. Each office needed support in optimising solutions specific to its location.
• Despite changing levels of restrictions in varying countries, some questions were universal: Can I still work from home? How often? Who do I ask?
• Team leads needed clear communication directions on how to manage remote teams, and also on how to best share information with team members.
• The mental health of team members also had to be addressed proactively. Two years of uncertainty, lockdowns and changing work conditions could take a toll on some team members, and we had to stay on top to ensure their well-being.

However, despite the challenges, opportunities presented themselves as well. We learnt that we could still be creative and deliver great projects for our clients despite the challenge of “having to just make things work”. This was a key learning that helped remove our bias toward “one solution for all”. We could still deliver as a collective team of teams while also being mindful and inclusive towards individual preferences for planning workdays. This also allowed us to fully embrace a whole new paradigm of what it means to work together, one that fully embraced our differences.

To formalise our new hybrid ways of working, and integrate it into our company culture, global management and our Global People Team tasked a small team of senior designers and strategists to run the process as they would with a client project. The brief was to gather insights from every employee in Manyone and, based on this, create “something” that could solidify a supportive working environment that would promote strategic creativity while also solving our pain points across every office and team in Manyone.

The process from there included:

• Desk research where we dived into how others solved their challenges, what did they see as their main solutions?
• A global company survey in which we asked open-ended questions to allow people to tell us anything. To do this, we invited people to answer anonymously so they could freely express their opinions.
• From here we embarked on a synthesis and identification process looking at the most important clusters of pain points, and the opportunities we could use to learn and implement new processes and tools. Additionally, we made sure to have a keen eye on personal as well as social drivers, as they would be key in creating emphatic workspaces.
• Having gathered insights from every level in the company, we also specifically engaged in a global team lead survey to discover their key pain points and opportunities for creating the optimal ways of working from their perspective.
• We dived further into this aspect by bringing the project team together in both physical and virtual workshops to evaluate and align on their feedback. During this phase, we also gathered input on how they saw opportunities to shape the future of working within their team and for collaborating across teams.
• At specifically defined milestones we included global management for their support, insights and their perspectives on how we could use both pain points and opportunities to drive positive change.

Using the clusters of insights as a foundation, we then moved forward in identifying five key areas that were strongly affecting people’s wellbeing, creative and strategic output, and the connections on a human level to their teams and colleagues overall. These five key areas were distilled into five guiding principles for our ways of working together. We dubbed them principles rather than rules, as it was key to give each team the trust and autonomy to define their own ideal model and adapt it accordingly to local context, cultures, and for when the world might change again. The principles also articulate the importance of recognising our individuality as humans, when it comes to our physical and mental health needs, and how to approach many issues regarding our emotional and social wellbeing. The principles specifically encourage that we all communicate and support each other in creating a work environment where we can all thrive, while also understanding that we are all different — and that this difference is a strength.

The five principles are:

The survey also showed that people had very specific questions, and to answer — most of these — we created a Ways of Working playbook to accompany the principles. In the playbook, our employees can find good advice for daily habits that can make their lives easier, such as finding a healthy work-life balance, and a number of other topics.

What does this mean for a company like Manyone?

It means everything! People and their ability to express themselves in creative ways are the foundation of Manyone, and their well-being is the key to fostering a work environment where strategic creativity can thrive, challenge conventions and create impactful products and services. Our Ways of Working is the foundation for that. We spend precious hours of our life with our colleagues and the key to Manyone’s existence as a company is making those hours inspiring, creatively challenging, and rewarding.

And we’re not done yet. Everything is in motion. The world, how we work, and our daily lives. And so, our principles cannot be set in stone. We need to revisit our principles several times a year to ensure that we change when the world and people change. The 9 to 5 workweek at the office has survived a surprising number of years, but from now on we’ll make fewer assumptions, and ask more questions. We believe it is the optimal way forward when defining how we work best as a global team of teams. And who knows, maybe you can be inspired by this as well? Otherwise, reach out and we’d be happy to tell you more.

Authored by Adam Walker, Mikkel Stange, Louise Dreyer and Liza Dragsbæk.

Manyone is a strategy-design hybrid. Visit us at Manyone.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.