The Future of Work

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The Future of Organizational Design

Using new organization models for speed Among the many challenges of 2020, organizations had to quickly adapt by using new operating models. Agile and tech-enabled operating models helped organizations speed up and thrive during these high-stakes times. ‎ ‎ ‎ Moving forward, organizations will have to continue embracing a hybrid-remote operating model to unlock value during the crisis and beyond.

Focusing on decision making In the modern business landscape, a delayed decision can be worse than a wrong decision —and during the pandemic, most organizations made the fastest decisions they've ever made. As companies organize for the future, it is important to include your pre-pandemic research with additional actions to sustain rapid decision making.

Applying an accelerated pace to prepare for the future What is your organization all about? How are you going to operate it? How can you grow it? These are three crucial questions a leader like you should ask to prepare your organization for the information revolution. To overcome this paradigm shift, your organization must have a flexible operating model based around networks of teams that collaborate and practice cutting-edge work practices.

Select the organizational design trends that people looking to start their own organization should remember. Select all that apply

Create stability through discipline and clarifying roles Despite everyone talking about laborious efforts of employees during a crisis, these alone are not enough to help an organization sustain its momentum. Rather, establishing a stable backbone is what guarantees a sustainable organizational health. Through operational discipline and codified approaches, members of your organization can optimize communication and help avoid re-inventing the wheel. Clarifying roles help ensure that employees understand what is expected of them as well as their contributions to the organization.

Turning Your Organization Into A Network of Teams

Many of us may have been familiar already with the typical business hierarchy similar to the image shown above. This organization model has been used by many organizations since 1917 and is still used by many up to this day!

Despite being a popular organization model of its time, the traditional hierarchy model eventually became a symbol of the outdated command-and-control model that was designed more than a century ago. It was designed for a world that no longer exists; a stable and slow-moving, predictable world.

‎Using network of teams as your organizational model allows you to transition from this:

To this:

In a network of teams, an organization replaces the traditional pyramid hierarchy with structures that allow small, autonomous teams to organize and collaborate with one another through internal networks... steering your organization away from structures that look like static slow-moving pyramids to something that looks more like a flexible and fast-moving swarm of start-ups!

Network of Teams -- Why They Work: • It breaks down silos, which typically hinder the flow of information in an organization. #10; • It promotes a sense of ownership for the teams as they are responsible for their own results. #10; • Employees feel that they are involved in running the business. #10; • It promotes a healthy dose of peer pressure and competition among different teams. #10; • Teams are able to quickly adapt and respond to your customer's constantly-changing needs. #10; • The increased autonomy level leads to an increased engagement level.

Prepare a blueprint The first step is to build a blueprint of everyone's current way of working. Through online surveys and interviews, you can ensure that every member of the organization is involved to accurately map out their connections. This step will also highlight the processes and methods that needs improvement.

Gather recommendations In this step, you can draft a report featuring the blueprint that your team came up with along with everyone's input on how to improve the organization's processes. This is also the step where your team can identify the following items: • Which teams were needed to cover different tasks? • How many people should be under each team? • What are the competencies needed by each members?

Profile the teams Using the recommendations you collected from step two, you can draft a "team profile" for each task under your organization, describing the expertise needed within different teams.

Organize a kick-off Once the members of the drafted teams have been introduced to one another, you can give them a period of time to be acquainted and let them talk about their vision of success, and how they want to treat each other. They can use this period to exclusively discuss personal and team boundaries to identify the things they can share with one another and what should be kept private.

Start building road maps Once the introductory period is over, provide the teams with a period of time to design their own road maps, specifying their goals and how they are going to track success.

Distributed Teams and their Benefits

What is a distributed team?

In the traditional workplace model, there are only two possible outcomes if an employee wants to relocate.

It's either you accept that you'll have to have some remote workers, or lose that employee.

By working as a distributed team, your organization won't have to lose a talent based on location!

Recent studies even suggest that working remotely is good for employee wellness and happiness, which helps them stick with the same company longer!

Key benefit 3: Reduced operational costs To simply put it, it's cheaper! Even with a competitive salary package for every employee, not having an office space significantly lowers the costs you need to run a business. Companies often re-purpose the costs saved to offer perks, and hold team activities or retreats. This allows the employees to still see each other and bond, while promoting a more exciting team culture!

Best Practices in Managing Distributed Teams

Hold structured daily and weekly meetings Asking questions and collaborating with your team is always better face-to-face than online. Your team can use tablets on constant video conference, in case anyone in the team needs to ask a question.

Have a multi-channel meeting environment Communication channels should always be clear and accessible since staying connected with your team is one of the essentials in running a distributed team.

Don’t rely on email With endless threads that are frustrating to search and attachments that are so hard to find, email wouldn't be the most efficient collaboration tool for your team.

Communicate clear and realistic expectations with your team Since it's easier to read people's body language and talk more often in an office set-up, overlooking or misunderstanding an instruction can easily happen in a distributed environment. That's why it is important to write and speak clearly when agreeing on tasks and deadlines.

What are the three things to focus on when running a distributed team?

Create a true team feeling Remote work can feel lonely. Office chats and lunch breaks can be distracting and unproductive, but at the same time, they’re a part of social life It might be harder to feel team spirit when working from home; but the good thing is your team can use collaboration tools not only for doing work but also for fun! Using team collaboration tools, such as Slack, or Google Hangouts, your employees can communicate freely about their hobbies, news, and other non-work things. Create channels where people can share their: • Favorite Spotify playlists • Photos of their pets • Or feelings about their latest TV-show binge! If possible, organize company retreats and offline meetings as well, within reason. It may not be cheap, especially when the team is distributed around the world, but for all the benefits of remote work, having face-to-face team-building time is defenitely priceless!

Cutting-Edge Work Practices

Build trust, be human. A human connection simply favors people in any type of relationship, including the one you have with your team mates. Showing their human side to the team is one of the things that leaders can do in order to get their team's trust. Aside from it, being open to your team is also a good way to build trust and be human. According to studies, people tend to be more open with you when you are open with them!

It might be hard to admit that your colleagues may one day choose to leave for a different job or career.

While nobody wants to view their business as a stepping stone, the fact remains that jobs are fluid.

With that said, your colleagues will want to know that you support them and their futures, regardless if it's with your company or not.

If you want to see a change in engagement levels, help people plan out how they can take their career to new heights!

Allow people to make their own choices