Aspiring to agility across your organisation is easy. Measuring it definitely isn’t. Here, guest bloggers, Hotbox, pose some key questions to help shed light on where you are on your agile working journey.
Pioneers of the hybrid working movement, Hotbox create products specifically designed to keep all your everyday essentials in easy reach. With a range of ‘In the office’ locker-friendly caddies and ‘On the go’ padded travel bags that’s been 20 years in the making, they are a leading voice in shaping the modern agile workspace.
With the constant growth of hybrid working culture proving itself worldwide, aspiring to be more agile is easy. Devising a strategy that you think is right for your organisation is quite a bit harder. What’s harder still is knowing how effective that strategy is proving. Agility is, after all, a journey not a destination. There is no official body who will turn up and present you with your agility certificate – proving you’ve arrived. The criteria for agility are often ones that you need to set yourself.
That said, there are some key markers you can use to understand where you currently are on your journey. These are by no means exhaustive or scientific – anyone who tells you they have the perfect formula for measuring your agility should have pretty amazing credentials and a really good rationale for how they came up with it. Instead, these are our starters for ten: a rough gauge that will tell you if you’re moving in the right direction.
1. Workspaces
Where do people sit in your organisation? Does everyone sit in the same spot every day, or do they move around? Can people work from home when they want to? If you have pods or breakout spaces, do people actually use them as they were intended? Having lockers and an agile space doesn’t guarantee agility, if people are still resorting to their familiar comfortable established patterns.
2. Systems and processes
Are your internal systems and processes suited to agile or hybrid working? Sometimes the flexibility and creativity people can bring to their role is limited by larger frameworks outside their control. Finding a balance that works for everyone and remains efficient and intuitive is essential, and ultimately no amount of commitment to a hybrid model will make the slightest difference if your organisation is structurally resistant to it.
3. Tools
Have you got the kit that is empowering agility, be that digital platforms / tech or something more tangible like Hotbox? There are lots of hybrid working products designed for different types of workers. From in the office icons like Hotbox 4 to on the go packs like Shuttle, Hotbox products are tailored specifically to give people freedom and the power to define their workspace their own way. There are countless companies releasing other hybrid-specific products all the time. If you haven’t provided your teams with the kind of resources they need to think and act with more agility, you can’t expect them to have reached their potential.
4. Culture
Do you have an openly recognised ‘hybrid working culture’ in which agility is celebrated and understood? Group and individual attitudes may vary – and if when the word hybrid is mentioned you hear the odd groan, then you probably need to invest some resources in helping everyone see the benefits and commit to the journey with you.
You may be giving a big thumbs up to all four, but if one or more feels like a ‘could do better’, then the first thing you need to ask yourself is ‘why?’ Is it a hole in your strategy, or was the strategy not communicated as effectively as it could have been? Is there an obstacle you can’t see, or a general resistance amongst your staff?
Every organisation will be on its own hybrid journey, and a lot of that is a learning journey. Agility isn’t something to push for blindly, it’s something to embrace in the form that is most appropriate to you.
And no matter how agile you are today, the real question is ‘How agile will you be tomorrow?’