Culture ways of working Don’t be a TW*T, WWYWB! Last updated on February 2nd, 2022 You know the story. It’s 2020 and everyone has to work from home. As knowledge workers with a history of flexible and remote-friendly ways of working, this was not a huge challenge, despite our love for post-it-ful workshops. Back then, we imagined us coming back to our Brighton office as soon as we were done with COVID. If only. As time went by, we quickly understood that some of us wanted to pretty much always work from home, some of us wanted to come to the office and some of us wanted to keep our options open. Padme, one of our Front end developurrrs showed a keen interest in working from home And we were not alone. A survey by Deloitte found that over 90% of employees thought that “choice and flexibility should be at the heart of how we work in the future.” This became a defining moment for us. We wanted to give our teams the flexibility they wanted, even if that meant the way we worked, and therefore our culture, would forever change. We didn’t want to be TW*Ts, the business owners asking their employees to come work on given days (TW*Ts stands for Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). We wanted to put choice first. This was no trifle for us, as we had built a strong culture, and we knew the space we physically shared was important in that. We were also aware of the risks of remote working. In 2020, Adobe Workfront conducted research with technology workers both before the pandemic began, and 6 months into the UK’s first lockdown. The study is now a great piece of evidence into the advantages and risks of increased remote work. The authors conclude that there is no question that remote working has helped give people more autonomy and empowerment. However, it has challenged other crucial ingredients to a successful work culture such as alignment (how well employees understand and connect with corporate strategy) and communication. We set out to design a way of working that could help our people reap the benefits of remote and in-office working and make us a better place to work than either traditional office-based jobs or whole-remote experiments. This can be simply summed up as “Work Where You Work Best”. A simple yet powerful idea that recognises the diversity of our workforce and the complexity of people’s needs as they go through different projects and life stages. But to make WWYWB work, we had to think deeply about people, systems, technology, processes and culture. And this my friends, it’s for another post: Making hybrid work, work.
