Adapting your processes to an emerging hybrid workplace

Transitioning to more permanent hybrid working models in 2021 is going to be a challenge for many organisations. Flexible working is here to stay and many businesses will need to adapt their processes to effectively manage some staff working from the office and some working from home.  I’m sure many of you have experienced the hybrid meeting where six people are sitting in a meeting room in the office and two people have joined via a video call.  Unless your meeting rooms are set up with purpose-built video conferencing infrastructure like ‘Microsoft Teams Rooms’ the people who have joined the call remotely can quickly feel left out of the conversation.  Well, it’s likely that many of your organisations processes will be impacted by this emerging hybrid workplace.

So where should we start?

Understanding how your business will operate more effectively with a hybrid working model requires an understanding of your processes. Whether that is:

• Onboarding a new client
• Creating your business strategy
• Managing your creditor payments
• Running your fortnightly payroll

They are all comprised of activities completed by different people across the organisation that depending on how well they are executed can have a significant impact on your customer experience. Some of these activities will be impacted more significantly than others as a result of hybrid working.

In order to make changes to and improve the way you do things in your organisation, you need to apply a structured approach to your process improvement efforts.

As a famous process expert once said:

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” W Edwards Deming

Business Process Improvement is the effort that goes into identifying, understanding, analysing, re-designing, implementing, and continuously monitoring the processes you want to improve.

So, how do you know where to begin for your organisation?

Visualise your whole business at a high level

Compile a high-level list of processes within your organisation and how they fit together.  This is known as your organisation’s process architecture or process framework.  Use a method to highlight the processes that are most likely to be impacted by a hybrid working model.

Here is an example of a process framework for an IT managed services business:

Understand the scope of impacted processes

The first rule of process improvement? You don’t need to change everything. You can start your process improvement journey by focusing on just one process. Use a structured assessment method to narrow your efforts and identify the processes that are most likely to be heavily impacted by a hybrid working model.

Prioritise your process improvement

Now you have an understanding of your process framework and the areas that are impacted by hybrid working, apply some thinking to each process to determine where you should focus your time.

• First, ask yourself some key questions regarding each of the high priority processes you have identified for review?
• How frequently is the process executed? E.g. Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly
• What volume of transactions are managed through the process? E.g. High, Medium, Low
• What level of internal satisfaction is there with the process? E.g. Extremely dissatisfied to Extremely satisfied
• What level of external satisfaction is there with the process? E.g. Extremely dissatisfied to Extremely satisfied
• What is the process execution pain currently being experienced? E.g. High, Medium, Low
• What is the impact of a hybrid working model on this process? E.g. High, Medium, Low

By developing a weighting for each of these questions you will start to form a view of the priorities that need to be addressed by your process improvement efforts.

Engage the right people in your change program

One of the major challenges when embarking on a process improvement initiative is that everyone does not see the same set of problems. Have you heard of the ‘Iceberg of Ignorance’? This term was coined by consultant Sidney Yoshida in a 1989 study of a Japanese car manufacturer, Calsonic.

It describes how frontline workers were aware of 100% of the problems faced by the organisation, while team leaders were aware of 74%, middle managers were aware of only 9%, and senior executives saw just 4% of problems.

Unfortunately, not much has changed in many large organisations over the years. To understand the issues that are being created across your processes by a hybrid working model you need to engage the right people to understand your current state processes. Once you have a clear understanding of the current state process and problems, you can start assessing how things need to be adapted and changed for a hybrid workforce.

Conclusion

Ongoing change is going to be a consistent theme again for all organisations in 2021. As hybrid working becomes the new normal you need to narrow the focus of your process improvement initiatives to those processes that are going to be most heavily impacted by this change.

So remember:
• Visualise the whole of your business
• Understand the scope of impacted processes
• Engage the right people across the organisation to understand the problems and how to solve them