The Dynamic Workplace: Identifying Your Critical Success Factors
Re-Imagining Business
Aligning priorities
“Mundipharma is completely reviewing the way we operate, from how we engage with customers, to when & where we do our work. Through 3 short virtual workshops, LEF helped us to focus on the critical success factors in moving from the status quo to the future, by identifying some key personas & defining success from their perspective. We are still early in the journey, but having this focus has already helped in aligning our priorities.”
Susannah Howard
Learning Agility Lead, Europe
Mundipharma IT Services
Working practices and customer expectations have changed, and organizations must adapt to retain both. By challenging the established working norms and identifying critical success factors for your organization, this will help you prioritize and shape the necessary actions for your organization to respond and evolve.
LEF’s Dynamic Workplace workshop helps you identify and design the critical success factors you need to address in any change of working practice. We leverage our research on collaboration with our expertise in knowledge management and underpin it with immunity to change thinking. These success factors centre around the social and relationship capital that significantly enhances the knowledge capital of any organization. It also requires effective performance management with the right culture and values designed to support it.
Creating a workspace that works for everyone
The big question is how do I create a workspace that gets the best of everyone involved without losing the magic of what we had before? How do we take the benefits of being co-located into a virtual space and maintain the richness of human contact? How do we retain the space for ‘gossip’ in a virtual space? This tacit knowledge that is often shared in person can be the magic for product innovation and the magic in connecting people together; it is the force that creates trust and the social fabric of organizations.
Every organization has its own unique set of cultures and behaviours in how it plays and wins. Identifying and understanding the biggest opportunities and challenges that any change impacts have to be identified and put up front. LEF has identified practical frameworks to help facilitate this dialogue and gained insights into what rituals and practices work best for certain situations.
Create and replenish relationship capital
How do we build rapport with someone that we’ve only ever met online? Many organizations have dipped into the relationship trust bank recently, but how do we ensure that capital is replenished, and how do we help introduce new colleagues into established teams where there’s no easy way for in-person meetings? Breaking bread for some has been a powerful way to build trust. What is the virtual equivalent? These are the considerations that organizations depending on the nature of their work, and distribution, are trying to address and find the solution that best fits for them. Whilst adoption of the latest workplace technology will obviously help, the way we introduce any more technology into what essentially is a human situation, has to be at the forefront of any workplace and workspace design thinking.
Understand needs & how to meet them
When we explore the issues that underpin some of these concerns, we encounter the need to:
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Create & enhance psychological safety for all our employees (& with our customers).
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Maintain human connection through serendipity moments & coffee-type conversations.
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Improve inclusion & engagement of all our employees, particularly the new recruits.
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Understand how the power dynamics will shift when we operate virtually.
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Develop stronger engagement with clients/customers when they are also working differently.
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Ensure the right leadership behaviours are in place to operate in this type of environment.
All the above is possible with effective solutions in place. But the challenge is rarely about the technology, rather about how it is adopted in concert with engrained working practices and behaviours. This workshop explores what is required to achieve this.
Workshop agenda
At the end of this one-day workshop, you’ll leave with a set of critical success factors to consider as you develop your new workplace and workspace of the future and an agreed action plan for how to implement those factors as you move forward.
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Workshop session
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Outcome
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Introductions & objectives
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Set expectations
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Agitate: get clear
Help you get specific on the challenges & associated opportunities & determine what you want & need
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Understand the changing workplace & your role within it
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Activate: create possibilities
Discuss & evaluate opportunities for alternative approaches
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Deepen understanding of what’s working, what isn’t, & what change possibilities exist to prioritize future action
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Activate: rituals & practices
Provide perspectives on signals, serendipity, safety; identify how people work individually & together as teams; discuss & evaluate your personal rituals & practices
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Agree the rituals & practices that you want to transfer into your new working environment
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Accelerate: designing your workplace requirements
Discuss keep/stop/continue in ways of working: pre- and post-Isolation Economy
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Identify & agree steps that support the change needed; equip you with anthropological skills for future working practices
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Action: confirm Critical Success Factors to take forward
Review outputs & next steps to progress journey
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Agreed plan of critical success factors to execute on
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Gain clarity about your challenges & opportunities
Understand the rituals & practices you need to implement in the new way of working
Learn how to evaluate your workplace requirements for future success
Identify the CSFs your organization needs to think about & how to land them
