Hybrid Working Principles for your Business

• People should be trusted to do a good job

• Routine rituals help us align and prioritise

• Asynchronous working, documentation and transparency help us collaborate when hybrid

• Face-to-face time is necessary, but it's not necessary all the time

People should be trusted to do a good job

I don't care if you come in late or have to leave early to collect the kids.

I don't care when or how you get the work done.

I only care if you're prioritising your focus, taking responsibility for deliverables and hitting your targets.

If there is clarity about the priorities, responsibilities and expectations the rest should be up to the individual to get on with it whatever way they see fit.

Routine rituals help us coordinate our whereabouts and expectations of each other

With hybrid working we are spending a lot more time alone and so it is important that we regularly reconvene to stay aligned.

You need to have purposeful rituals to bring your team together. A weekly team meeting, performance review, planning meeting etc.

They allow you to quickly baseline where everyone is at, look back, look forward, agree priorities and ownership before dispersing again.

The practical benefit is that when we have a structure of routine rituals we all know where we are supposed to be at any given time and we are all working to the same rhythm. e.g. our Mondays was an office day for the team and time was allocated to our weekly performance meetings and planning sessions

Each one should have a clear purpose, a regular (ideally weekly) time that does not change. Attendance is mandatory.

Asynchronous working, documentation and transparency are all crucial to effective collaboration

We can still collaborate effectively when we're separated and working different patterns. There are many tools that allow us to co-create documents, designs, code, presentations etc. Use them!

Part of the challenge with hybrid working is when information sits in individuals heads. We feel that we need a call, or a meeting in order to get information and move forward. Documenting everything as you go is important to effective collaboration across dispersed teams. Instead of thoughts, agreements, plans sitting in our head or personal notepads they can live in shared notes. Agreements, decisions, plans, important details can be referred to at any point by the people that may need to know removing common blockages.

A common hesitancy with this is not wishing others to have access to your work-in-progress documentation. I certainly felt this to begin with. I think a common theme to effective collaboration here is letting go of control and trusting those around you.

Face-to-face time is necessary, but it's not necessary all the time

I don't have the science to back this up - but we need time together.

We need it to build and maintain rapport, which is so crucial to effective working relationships. Trust, understanding, alignment all depend on being together regularly. It is possible to maintain great working relationships purely over video calls, but its much harder. It doesn’t need to be Mon-Fri 9-5, but it does need to have some regularity.

We also need it for certain types of working, such as workshopping or planning where we need creative energy, inclusivity and diversity of thought and contribution.

At Guild our hybrid policy adhered to these principles. In practice it was:

• Mondays and Wednesdays the whole team in the office

• 10am-4pm are core hours for everyone - e.g. all are expected to be working with full flexibility outside of this

• Mondays for in-person team rituals - most important being the Weekly Performance Review (look back at past week, priorities for upcoming week)

• Wednesdays for in-person 121s and ad-hoc meetings, workshops etc

• Fridays a no-meeting day to get on with focus dependent work (no more "I haven't had time to look at that")

• Meetings, including rituals, that could be call-only where for Tuesdays and Thursdays