making it workdownload.microsoft.com/documents/uk/about/hybrid... · 2018-12-05 · maintaining...

Making it workThe hybrid OrganisaTiOn in PracTice

May 2011

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Contentsacknowledgements...............................................................................................................3

introduction.............................................................................................................................4

executive summary...............................................................................................................5

recap: What do we mean by ‘hybrid’?...........................................................................11

Hybrid Operational Model 1: The ‘Holistic’ Organisation....................................................14

step one on the hybrid journey: Leading from the front...........................................16

Hybrid Operational Model 2: The ‘Follow-Me’ Organisation..............................................20

step two on the hybrid journey: creating engagement.............................................22

Hybrid Operational Model 3: The ‘Bump’ Organisation.......................................................36

Hybrid Operational Model 4: The ‘Untraditional’ Organisation..........................................38

step three on the hybrid journey: barriers to success..........................................................41

Hybrid Operational Model 5: The ‘People-First’ Organisation............................................46

conclusions: resilience is realisable................................................................................48

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Microsoft would like to thank the members of the Hybrid Organisation advisory Board:

Charlotte alldritt, Senior Consultant, Volterra

Dave Coplin, Director of Search and Hybrid Organisation Lead, Microsoft

Peter Flade, Managing Partner, gallup consulting

Peter Hemington, Corporate Finance Partner, bdO

Graeme Leach, Chief Economist, institute of directors

Philip Ross, CEO of Unwork.com

Special thanks also to the all individuals and organisations that agreed to be interviewed for this paper:

Paul Farmer, CEO, and Katherine Gardiner, Finance and Resources Director, Mind

anthony Henry, Director of Design, Macquarie bank

Colin King, Worldwide Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace, glaxosmithKline

Marcus Powell, HR Director, Nuffield Health

Darren Stone, IT Manager, West yorkshire Fire & rescue

Peter de Winter, Senior Program Director for Workplace Innovation, Philips

Acknowledgements

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In 2010, Microsoft launched the concept of the Hybrid Organisation. Working with experts from the fields of social change, workplace design, economics, technology and public sector development, Microsoft identified several characteristics of businesses and organisations that are best placed to thrive in uncertain times. These ‘Hybrid’ Organisations, we said 1, are those that combine the three elements of people, workplace and technology in equal measure. a successful organisation would be one that empowered its people to work in the way they would be most productive, allowing them to be measured by outputs, empowered through innovative and flexible workplace design and a range of technologies and tools that help them do their jobs more effectively.

While last year’s paper generated some very interesting debate among experts and commentators – especially about the impact of changing workforce demographics and working styles – the notion of what exactly constituted a ‘Hybrid Organisation’ remained a subject for further discussion.

One year on from the original roundtable and paper publication, Microsoft has reconvened the Hybrid Organisation advisory Board, with additional representation from the worlds of business, accounting and human resources consultancy. This year, our aim was to revisit the concept of Hybrid and move towards practical examples and guidance for organisations that want to get the most value from their people, workplace and the tools they can use to generate success – whether that is in terms of sales, profitability, productivity, employee engagement, increased market share or increased relevance to stakeholders and citizens.

As the economy and markets continue to fluctuate, businesses and public sector organisations face a myriad of challenges. Being Hybrid is about being best able to react to change and opportunity – irrespective of organisation size. and as this paper shows, it’s all about people.

Introduction

1 The original Hybrid Organisation whitepaper is available to download at: http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/about/hybridorganisation/Creating-the-Hybrid-Organisation.pdf

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adapt or die; change is the norm; seize the day. The carpe diem carping of management commentators constantly tells us that successful organisations are flexible, agile and entrepreneurial – they spot opportunities and they react to them, meeting customer and stakeholder needs in a way that drives sustained competitive advantage. We are also told that people are an organisation’s most important asset – innovation comes from ideas, and the organisation that can ‘empower’ its people.

While all this is true, for most organisations the process of getting to this point is more difficult than management rhetoric would suggest. The Microsoft ‘Hybrid Organisation’ initiative was begun in 2010 to examine the nature of successful organisations. Last year, we launched a paper that delved deeper into organisational structure and outlined the traits of a ‘Hybrid Organisation’ – one that considered people, workplace design and tools at the same time to create a more entrepreneurial and productive workforce. as we stated:

“Organisations of the future will allow for flexibility and spontaneity; the seamless movement between the virtual and the physical – whether that’s in team structures, the places we work or the technology we use. a Hybrid Organisation is one characterised by fluidity – not rigid structures or linear processes. Evidence of this change is starting to be seen in many organisations – whether it’s in flexible working policies, virtual teams, the dissolution of compartmentalised office space or the emergence of cloud computing.”

In this second Hybrid Organisation paper, we pull the concept of the Hybrid Organisation out of theory and into practice, drawing on the experience of an expanded Hybrid Organisation Advisory Board, including experts from the fields of economics, building design, technology, employee engagement and corporate finance. We have also interviewed senior workplace strategists, as well as IT managers, CFOs and CEOs of organisations large and small, to explore the strategies they have taken to pursue a people-focused Hybrid strategy - one that delivers tangible and intangible benefits to the organisation.

Central to our findings is the concept of resilience: where organisations are structured and people managed in a way that allows for entrepreneurial decision-making, innovation, sharing of ideas and the ability to spot and act on opportunities, irrespective of the external pressures acting on the organisation.

Executive Summary

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In order to create this environment, employees need to collaborate with each other without being encumbered by poorly designed offices, archaic processes or clunky technology. They also need freedom to work when and where they want within the constraints of the organisational business model. above all, they need to feel that they are contributing to the success of the organisation and, in turn, are supported by the right policies, management structure and tools.

In this context, organisations have clear choices to make in terms of their aproach. They can ignore their employees’ needs and continue to drive short-term strategies and business models; they can try to address HR policy in isolation; or they can fundamentally rethink the way that people are catered for and how they are supported in doing their jobs. The first is the strategy for many businesses, the second is a siloed approach that pays lip service to employee engagement and the third is a more Hybrid approach – which requires difficult decisions, management attention and a business case that is often hard to quantify.

Organisations of all sizes and from a variety of industry sectors are starting to behave in this way, focusing on their people and the tools and resources needed to make them more productive, entrepreneurial and engaged. However, our constant quest to become more innovative is difficult on two fronts. The first is the continuing economic uncertainty and external social and market pressures that put the squeeze on long-term strategy and divert management attention into short-term cost saving and, often, organisational survival. The second is internal inertia. Most organisations just don’t embrace change – whatever the socio-economic climate. They are risk-averse, senior management can see employee engagement as a trade-off for profitability, and junior management often aren’t equipped with the skills to deal with the ‘newness’ of flexible working styles, consumer technology and management by outcomes.

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execUTiVe sUMMary

It need not be this way. as the case studies in this paper show, there are a range of practical steps that organisations can take to drive productivity, create an attractive workplace for employees and potential employees and ensure that the organisation remains agile and adaptive. Often, the catalyst for these organisations to pursue a Hybrid strategy is based on short-term financial gain, but the outstanding achievement of these organisations – and secret to their success – is their ability to engender a culture of proactive change and innovation, while maintaining employee and customer loyalty over the long term.

The secrets to hybrid success

step 1: create an appropriate vision and drive it from the top down

• The Hybrid Organisation is a resilient organisation that succeeds because of its leadership, culture and strategy – not in spite of them.

• Leadership matters, enabling change towards a more people-focused organisational structure and culture. Cultural change is challenging and can take time, but a powerful vision reinforced from the top is an important catalyst.

• There is no such thing as a single Hybrid vision or strategy. There is no right or wrong. Every organisation is different and should approach change in an appropriate way.

Outlined in this paper are some simple, practical ways for different organisations to think through what Hybrid means for them. As a starting point, organisations need to define the catalyst for delivering a Hybrid strategy. In our research, we have identified five types of Hybrid organisation operating models – each of which focuses on some or all of the three pillars of people, workplace and technology to effect a successful business outcome, organisational change and innovation. In each case, the Hybrid approach is driven by a different initial approach, even if the end vision is similar.

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execUTiVe sUMMary

‘Follow me’ an organisation that signals change from boardroom action.

‘bump’ an organisation that focuses on workplace design to enable chance meetings and collaboration.

‘People first’ an organisation where all strategy has first and foremost to support the needs of the workforce.

‘Untraditional’Organisations with rigid structures and fixed tasks, but uses IT to oil the wheels.

‘holistic’an organisation that approaches people, workplace and technology in unison from the outset.

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step 2: starting the hybrid journey: four ways to create a resilient organisation

The Hybrid Organisation is a resilient organisation that succeeds because of its leadership and vision. But, when putting that vision into practice, it can be difficult to know where to start. From the advisory board discussion, research and case studies, Microsoft has identified four areas where organisations should focus their efforts.

1. Put people in touch with one another – inject an element of ‘chance’ into your organisation, whether that’s unpicking formal structures, facilitating chance meetings through shared workspaces or using technology to create virtual teams.

2. give your people proper tools to do their jobs properly – with half of all office space empty at any one time, fixed desks and telephones are being replaced by more flexible, shared workspaces and mobile technology. But organisations should be careful to avoid the potential pitfalls of chasing bright shiny objects and change for change’s sake.

Focus on the little things – even small changes can have huge significance. The type of coffee provided, bringing people 50 yards closer to one another, allowing people to work flexibly are all fundamental elements to success in the case studies featured.

4. Manage by outputs and create a trusting organisation – directly involving people in organisation strategy, while allowing employees to be measured by outputs, rather than inputs, leads to much better productivity and performance. Management should be encouraged to let go and trust employees. Trust creates employee buy-in, and drives demonstrable productivity and performance.

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step : identify and tackle barriers to success

• The single biggest blockage to better employee engagement is poor management – especially middle management.

• Business leaders should work with middle management to devise a hybrid vision, creating buy-in and driving change right through the organisation. If you have a strong leadership vision and give the people the tools and environment to flourish, but have a layer of poor management in the business, then your execution will falter.

• Medium-sized businesses – those that have grown from entrepreneurial roots – can become encumbered by bureaucracy and governance, hampering innovation and competitiveness. They require special attention if this essential tranche of UK business is to remain competitive.

In this paper we will explore each of these themes, drawing on insight and research from the advisory Board as well as case studies of companies of different sizes and from a variety of sectors and industries. These case studies prove the point from the last Hybrid Organisation paper that successful organisations are those that approach workplace, technology and people in unison, but emphasise the importance of the latter in building a resilient and adaptable organisation. it’s all about people.

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Recap: What do we mean by Hybrid?creating an engaged workforce and resilient organisation

The continuing economic uncertainty – and the repercussions it creates – is the backdrop in organisational success in both public and private sector organisations. To a certain extent, “It’s the economy, stupid” is as relevant today as it has always been. But, in recent months, it has become more and more clear that uncertainty is here to stay – and it’s how an organisation or business reacts to that uncertainly that defines how successful, or otherwise, it will be.

The statistics in the business pages of the press continue to be worrying, with reports suggesting there is a rise in firms suffering “significant” or “critical” financial distress in the first quarter of 2011 compared to last year2. Likewise, companies’ confidence in the industries they operate in has dipped to a two-year low . In the public sector, commentators are predicting as many as ,000 job losses 4 over the next five years.

With the bad news continuing to roll in, businesses and organisations can’t just wait for things to get better. and, allied to the economic situation, other external factors are continuing to put pressure on organisations: changing workforce demographics; consumer demand for greater choice; and the rise of disruptive innovators and new market entrants, whether in the UK or globally.

In this context, sustainable business growth, innovation, or simply staying above the waterline is less about waiting for market recovery than it is about understanding where market opportunities are and being able to execute on them quickly and efficiently. The capacity to identify and exploit market opportunity has always been at the heart of business success. The very nature of the UK’s service-based, knowledge-intensive economy now requires businesses to be structured in such a way as to support and enable their primary asset – their workforce.

as Peter Flade, Managing Partner of Gallup Consulting, says, quoting the respected student of leadership Warren Bennis , successful leadership is about creating ‘adaptive capacity’ that allows organisations to spot and act on opportunities, deliver results in shorter timeframes and generate value with the least possible resource.

2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business- http://www.bdo.uk.com/press/2011/4/marketing-spend-down-again-q1-economic-uncertainty-persists 4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8102121.stm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Bennis

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While harnessing people and their potential through good leadership and support structures is central to creating a resilient and entrepreneurial business, the measurement of how exactly a Hybrid approach can benefit an organisation is complicated. It is easy to measure sales and profitability; it is less easy to measure the impact of more nebulous concepts such as people, productivity and collaboration. This is why Hybrid is so important, yet so difficult.

as Peter de Winter, Senior Program Director for Workplace Innovation at Philips, says in a case study for this report: “We hope we will show that our people are working better. It’s very difficult to find hard data, but we’ll keep going because we think we are on the edge of a new era for the company.”

The biggest challenge for understanding the notion of ‘Hybrid’ is in the language we use around it. The idea of ‘people’ and ‘productivity’ will only get you so far. In this report, and through the case studies, we aim to work towards a more granular way of understanding Hybrid traits within businesses – both at a macro- and micro-economic level.

If we revert to accepted business theory, all businesses and organisations are structured in a way to reduce transaction costs in some way, to allow different people and skills to come together and collaborate to provide value to customers and stakeholders. The concept of Hybrid is about how to achieve this in the most efficient and sustainable way – not only in terms of bringing people together in an organisation structure, but also ensuring that structure is as flexible and fluid as possible and, of course, appropriate. As Graeme Leach, Chief Economist at the Institute of Directors, says:

“It’s about the quality and the quantity of fiscal capital you’ve got as an organisation, it’s quality and quantity of human capital, and then it’s what you’d call in economics ‘TFP’, total factor productivity – how efficient are you at bringing all those things together. A Hybrid Organisation addresses each of those areas, but takes them to the next level.”

The advisory Board discussions and case studies in this report reinforce the fact that there is no such thing as a single, archetypal ‘Hybrid Organisation’. Business success is not a single

recaP: WhaT dO We Mean by hybrid?

“The single strongest attribute of leadership is resilience. The key thing that leaders need to do is make a resilient organisation. and then all sorts of good things will follow.”

Peter Flade, Managing Partner of Gallup Consulting UK

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endpoint, but is the combination of different internal inputs and external outcomes. a law firm has to have certain governance structures that a media company would rail against, for instance, but we can put a stake in the ground to further define the common traits of a Hybrid Organisation – traits that we will discuss in the rest of this paper.

a hybrid Organisation is one that proactively breaks down the barriers between people, workplace and technology to create organisational resilience and sustainable positive outcomes for customers, stakeholders and employees.

The particular traits of a Hybrid Organisation may differ depending on organisational size or sector, but common features of a Hybrid organisation include:

• Making decisions based on people, workplace and tools in combination

• Empowering individuals to maximise their impact on organisational success

• Balancing short-term priorities with long-term vision

• Efficient use of resources to effect desired outcomes

• Entrepreneurial outlook supported by strategy and infrastructure

recaP: WhaT dO We Mean by hybrid?

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hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL One:

The ‘Holistic’ Organisation

Philips global Workplace innovation ProgramDriving organisation-wide innovation through people, workplace and technology

‘Innovation’ is an overused and often misunderstood word. For Philips, however, innovation is central to its business model. Its products range from LED lighting to Senseo coffee makers, healthcare patient monitors to shavers – all designed to simply making a difference to people’s lives. Philips, celebrating its 120th anniversary this year, employs 119,000 people across more than geographies.

Five years ago, Philips launched its Workplace Innovation Programme to create a great place to work, an environment that helps employees be more productive, inspired, and creative. as a business founded on ideas, the company did not want its organisational structure to stifle creativity and risk eroding competitive advantage.

Peter de Winter, Program Director for Workplace Innovation, outlines the set up of the project: “Philips’ Workplace Innovation Programme was originally started from a real estate perspective as a cost saving and efficiency project with full support from the board of management. However, very quickly, the programme started to bring in elements of HR and change management as the programme is more than a change of office environment. The IT element was included as we understood that you need the right tools to help people work flexibly and in a collaborative way.”

Now, three “Peters” in Philips – de Winter, Peter Wiesenekker who looks after HR and Peter de Kruijff who is responsible for IT – form a fully Hybrid team to deliver new ways of working at Philips. “In a company like Philips you need the right people working in the right way – they need easy access to knowledge, they need to collaborate on new ideas easily and they need to work in an environment with the right tools that keep people in the business and attract highly skilled staff in a very competitive environment,” says de Winter.

Philips is promoting activity-based working including hot-desking and mobile communications rather than fixed desks and land lines. It also has wireless in every office and virtual private networks to allow people to access core systems from wherever they are working.

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employees in sites worldwide are currently covered by the programme, with about people and some 20 offices targeted in the coming years. In total, about 40,000 employees are earmarked for the new ways of working.

Measuring the impact of the programme is not easy, but de Winter and his colleagues have introduced pre- and post-move Workplace Innovation surveys. The annual Philips employee engagement survey asks questions about how proud employees are of the company, the way they are managed and their feelings about how inspiring they feel their job is. The programme has added an additional question to the annual survey: ‘Is your working environment energising and inspiring?’

“We want to know whether our people feel that in the new environment they feel more content at work – that they are making a difference. Since the programme started, we have seen as much as a uplift in scores on a 100-point scale in this area. And this trend is confirmed by our more detailed pre- and post-move surveys,” says De Winter

That’s not to say that there isn’t still work to be done. In an open, collaborative environment, some employees have had problems with noise levels, for instance, so the company has put more emphasis on acoustic absorption and behaviour in the office. De Winter also says that there are some people in the business who are actively disengaged from the programme:

“Change management studies show that before a change project starts about of employees fully embrace new ways of working, about are neutral, but there are who are actively against change. The middle management layer – or the ‘clay’ layer of the business – is critical. Often, they are the managers who don’t like the idea of having their office taken away from them and they often manage by control instead of by results. All that we can do is try to take them on the journey with us – identify them and involve them directly. Most employees and managers, however, love to work according to the new ways of working once they are used to the concept”.

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL One: The ‘hOLisTic’ OrganisaTiOn

“it’s all about innovation in the workplace, with even more emphasis on people. are people being more entrepreneurial and coming up with new ideas? Well, we’ll see. We are launching a new research project that we’ll hope will show that people are working more efficiently. It’s very difficult to find hard data, but we’ll keep going because we think we are on the edge of a new era for the company.”

Peter De Winter, Program Director for Workplace Innovation

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Leading from the frontdriving culture and vision from the boardroom

Organisations like John Lewis are held up as exemplars of customer-centricity and employee engagement. In John Lewis’ case, the company has been run with people in mind since the

, when Speden Lewis, son of the founder, talked about happy customers, employees and outcomes .

To a certain extent, such organisations are a rare breed: John Lewis and its partnership structure is at the heart of its competitive differentiation and business model; other retailers embrace people-centricity to different degrees if they think it can improve their already paper-thin

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sTeP One On The hybrid jOUrney:

“if companies want to become employee- and customer-centric they have to make it part of their business model and achieve it through strong leadership. don’t even attempt it otherwise. revolution in the middle is a waste of time.”

Peter Flade, Managing Partner, Gallup Consulting UK

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margins; professional services firms are based on the quality of their people and intellectual capital. But for the majority of companies and organisations, the notion of ‘people-first’ is paid lip service or considered an unnecessary cost-centre.

Flade continues: “Most CEOs do not understand this at all. Most leaders see this as a play off, where you can’t have true engagement in a workforce and successful productivity as well as high profit. So I think it’s a big myth to say most organisations are moving towards a focus on employee engagement, especially in the public sector. Many employers will do almost everything that is against the basic needs that people have in the workplace.”

For those companies that do prioritise improving customer and employee engagement, Flade says they are rarely broken in the first place – they just want to improve something that is already central to their business model and competitive advantage.

But for those organisations that want to refocus their business models to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and customer service, it is essential that change begins at board level – in the form of a strong vision and executive sponsorship.

Organisations cannot easily replicate a John Lewis and drive it through the business overnight – especially if their business model is focused only on sales and margin, or if the structure of their organisation is hierarchical and complex. However, the advisory Board discussion suggests that organisations that do nothing – while driving high margins and sales in the short term – may face long-term issues in employee retention, competitiveness and maintaining customer loyalty. This is true for both the private and public sectors, as advisory Board members comment:

“at a macro level there’s a lot of talk around decentralisation and devolution in the public sector. That’s about a journey to solve very, very complex public policy problems in an entirely different way. To achieve this you have to move away from the hierarchical, top-down, command and control structure of traditional public administration.”

Charlotte Alldritt, Volterra.

“The market economy flushes out businesses who won’t change in response to their customers. customers eventually vote with their feet.”

Dave Coplin, Microsoft.

sTeP One On The hybrid jOUrney: Leading FrOM The FrOnT

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TrUsT – when you totally trust your leadership there’s a 1 in 2 chance you are engaged at work.

cOMPassiOn – understanding, empathy and creating an environment focused on people’s needs.

sTabiLiTy – ensuring that people feel secure in their jobs and the organisational strategy.

hOPe – creating confidence that the organisation will succeed in uncertain times.

For the private sector, a more fluid, people-centric organisation encourages innovation, entrepreneurialism and better customer engagement. For the public sector, cost constraints and socio-political changes mean it is essential to change the nature of service innovation and delivery to remain relevant and efficient.

a strong organisational vision and direction is an essential part of any form of change management. But what exactly does this entail? as Peter Hemington of BDO says: “When you see things go wrong in a company – and I’ve seen a lot of them over the last few years – you often blame something very vague called ‘leadership’.”

Gallup Consulting has recently conducted studies into the impact that strong leadership and employee engagement can have on the workplace and organisational success 7 and it finds that there are four essential elements for business leaders who want to galvanise their workforce and increase engagement in the workplace.

7http://eu.Gallup Consulting.com/london/14 177/invitation-state-global-workplace.aspx .


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These four elements are essential for a Hybrid strategy: organisational leaders not only have to create a people-focused vision, but also have to deliver it in such as way that employees feel supported, bought into the process and that the strategy is one that will help them remain secure and successful.

Success in this context comes in many forms, demonstrated by the case studies in this report: Philips’ management team wants the company to become more innovative; the mental health charity Mind wants its employees to collaborate in the best interests of beneficiaries; Macquarie Bank is focused on productivity and collaboration. But, in all of these cases, the vision is focused on people and is consistently sponsored from the top of the organisation.

as Colin King, GSK’s Worldwide Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace, says: “Board sponsorship gives us gravitas and helps engagement. They are also leading from the front; one of the first things we have done is move the board offices from the main GSK tower down to floor level, opening up the C-suite with glass, rather than brick walls and engineering an atmosphere of accessibility, openness and transparency.”

Sometimes, leadership simply takes the form of an impassioned individual or individuals who think they can make a difference. In the case of West yorkshire Fire & Rescue, the IT department, led by IT Manager Darren Stone communicated its vision for a paperless organisation – one that the management team were happy to support. “We have an immense passion for making this organisation work better, and now the people who are benefitting from the technology are getting that passion too. Once it clicks, you start getting people beating down the door to be involved,” says Stone.

Hybrid does not have single endpoint – it is an approach and journey that will be different for every organisation. But it does require strong leadership and a consistent vision. For those companies that are born customer focused, a Hybrid vision is an extension of their existing business model. For companies that are more reliant on driving sales without customer service as a priority, a people-focused model might require more change management and meet with more resistance. However, in the long-term, organisations must focus on their people and how they are supported and empowered if they are to remain competitive.


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The ‘Follow-Me’ Organisation

glaxosmithKlineLeading from the boardroom in workplace innovation

Colin King, GSK’s Worldwide Vice President of Real Estate and Workplace, joined the pharmaceuticals and consumer goods giant from Nokia in January 2010. at Nokia, he was responsible for million square feet of office space and had a central role in ensuring that the people in the organisation worked effectively and collaboratively. “Nokia was pretty huge,” says King. “But as a technology company it was naturally amenable to concepts such as mobility – it was in the organisation’s DNA. GSK is slightly different, but an amazing challenge.”

GSK is much larger than Nokia – it encompasses locations and over five times the office space. It is also an organisation split into many parts including research, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods – each with its own culture and workplace dynamic. King’s job is to help the organisation deliver an integrated workplace – what the company terms ‘SMaRT Working’.

“The concept of ‘SMART working’ is driven by our board of directors,” says King. “The aim is to create a set of objectives and policies that would bring the workplace together to help people perform better, encourage new ways of working, entice new employees into GSK, use our space more efficiently and provide employees with the tools and resources that make them feel supported.”

Underway in the UK and US, the project has already started to deliver change in behaviour as well as cost savings for the organisation. The offices are organised by activity so people can choose between collaborative and quiet workspaces. People are also being encouraged to move away from fixed desks and telephones, so they can work and collaborate more openly. Workplace innovation is even starting to happen in the most traditional areas of the business, with GSK having reengineered the laboratories so they can easily be converted from chemical to biological centres with supporting administration and quiet areas.

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL TWO:

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1. support and endorsement from the senior management team: the executive team signed off the Smart Working guidelines, clearly stating the need for technology enablers. This was followed by a global communication to all business unit FDs emphasising the guidelines were about less space (saving operating costs) used more effectively.

2. space design: adequate provision of variety of space, equally shared by all and supported through enabling technologies (meets the needs of people who use the space fl exibly and provides choice).

3. business engagement and ownership: the SMaRT Working team ensures that all projects have a visible local senior leader from impacted business that remains close to the project.

4. clear and committed change management programme: led by internal interface involving all employees impacted by the change.

5. robust review and feedback: pre- and post-occupation evaluations conducted to include online surveys and interviews.

6. Leaders at very top walk the talk. The board offi ces are located in the ground of GSK house just off the main street – open and visible to all as a signal of the openness and transparency of the company.

With such a vast business and arrange of work types and styles, King says you have to be careful that you don’t ignore different people’s needs throughout the business, but through the whole project is a sense that this is driven from the board and is unifying the company.

“The board sponsorship gives us gravitas and helps engagement. They are also leading from the front; one of the fi rst things we have done is move the board offi ces from the main GSK tower down to fl oor level, opening up the C-suite with glass, rather than brick walls and engineering an atmosphere of accessibility, openness and transparency.”

King says the project is paying for itself, as the company is picking the right moment for each stage. “You can’t do this sort of thing overnight in all locations,” King says. “You have to focus on one or two offi ces and then use opportunities such as lease expiries, growth and refurbishments to redesign the working environment in each location. The project is actually saving money because with eight desks to every 10 people we are more effi ciently using the space available and reducing real estate requirements.”

Why sMarT Working is successful in gsK

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL TWO: The ‘FOLLOW-Me’ OrganisaTiOn

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Creating engagementbuilding resilience and agility through an entrepreneurial workforce

Coplin’s statement made at the opening of this year’s advisory Board meeting sums up the Hybrid ideal. First and foremost it is about people; technology and workplace design are enablers of the strategy. and the most successful organisations are those that utilise the least amount of resource necessary to effect a positive outcome – what Coplin describes as “having as little as possible and as much as necessary.”

Large businesses and small start-ups will have different focuses and will require different levels of resource and apply it in different ways, but the outcome should be the same – a workforce that is pulling in the same direction, feels it is supported and acts in an empowered and entrepreneurial way.

as Peter Hemington from BDO says, the human element of business is where organisations can find competitive differentiation and sustainable success. “Resilience and agility is also about the ability to listen and learn from your people and have those positive feedback loops built into the organisation,” Hemington says. “We have made a long journey away from the factory system, a long journey away from the objectification of human beings. We are moving towards a much more human way of working, with people treated with respect, where human potential is liberated and people have the freedom to realise their potential.”

sTeP TWO On The hybrid jOUrney:

“This is not about technology. it’s about people and so this is about what you need to do organisationally both in terms of your organisation, the culture, the way in which you measure, manage, empower people to do their jobs, that absolutely has a massive influencing role on how successful you can be in a Hybrid context. This is equally about getting the most out of the individual but in a new way; this is about empowering the individual within the context of the organisation.”

Dave Coplin, Director of Search and Hyrbid Organisation Lead, Microsoft UK

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This is particularly striking in industries such as professional services, which are primarily knowledge driven and are looking to recapture an entrepreneurial spirit after the boom years.“I think all professional services firms have been through the same journey. In the last 20 years I’ve seen this enormous change in focusing on people as individuals in organisations. Lots of organisations got pretty fat during the good years, and then they had a sudden change in priorities during the recession. And in our organisation we’ve taken costs out, but we’ve also refocused more on our people and customer base.”

We have to be careful about generalising in this point. The reality of most people’s working days is actually quite different from that of organisations such as BDO. as Gallup Consulting research shows: “Work is one of the 10 least enjoyable activities people do during their waking hours, and spending time with their supervisor is the very worst point of the whole day. Only about a tenth of employees are actively engaged at work,” says Peter Flade.

While proof that a Hybrid approach delivers more entrepreneurial behaviour, or innovation, or productivity, it is hard to come by, Gallup Consulting’s extensive research does uncover tangible results from improved employee engagement.

“In manufacturing environments, for example, highly engaged teams suffer fewer lost work days at work,” says Peter Flade. “around employee turnover it’s anywhere between and

depending on how high your labour turnover is. So you are minimising the gross negatives in that scenario. If you make improvements at a local level you can also find big differences such as productivity, profit and customer service.”8

Ensuring consistent employee engagement is dependent on a number of factors. In the next section of this report we identify four critical steps to success.

8 http://eu.Gallup Consulting.com/london/ /invitation-state-global-workplace.aspx . Gallup Consulting’s State of the Global Workplace report surveyed 47,000 employees in 120 countries. It found that that of employees are actively disengaged, indicating they view their workplaces negatively and are liable to spread that negativity to others.When workforces are engaged, however – measured across a series of criteria – the median productivity level among the top-quartile of engaged business/work units was higher than among bottom-quartile units. Moreover, the median profitability level among top-quartile units was higher than among those in the bottom quartile.

sTeP TWO On The hybrid jOUrney: creaTing engageMenT

249 Data provided by SCB to the MacLeod Review. Engaging for Success July 2009

How engagement leads to productivity, profi tability and resilience

Gallup Consulting works with a range of large, people-heavy organisations, helping them to improve productivity and employee engagement. Standard Chartered and Kingfi sher’s B&Q DIY retail chain are just two of its success stories. banking on people

Standard Chartered Bank, which employs almost people in over 70 countries and territories, representing nationalities in more than 1,700 branches. Gallup Consulting has partnered with the bank on employee engagement since 2000.

Using Gallup Consulting’s Q12 methodology, a workplace climate survey and business performance data, Standard Chartered found that where they had managed to create more engaged employees they saw higher profi t margin growth than branches where employee engagement was low. The engaged branches also experienced lower voluntary staff turnover 9.


“The best way to drive overall business performance is to improve productivity in every individual team, and having measurement and reporting of engagement at team level is vital to create the right conversations on issues that matter at the local level. Using this focus, we have seen spectacular results, with our most engaged bank branches having signifi cantly higher deposit growth, better cost income ratios, and lower employee attrition than less engaged branches. This translates into real profi t with our most engaged teams producing over 20% more returns than less engaged groups.”

Tim Miller, Director of People, Property and Assurance at Standard Chartered Bank

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do-it-yourself engagement

In 2005 home improvement group B&Q experienced a reduction in sales which translated into a large reduction in profi t – what became apparent was that B&Q needed to make a lot of changes quickly. From its employee engagement survey the company worked out, with the help of Gallup Consulting, that they were spending £120m in wages on people who were actively disengaged 10.

Fraser Longdon 11, Kingfi sher’s Head of Talent and Engagement, says there were some very tough decisions to make in the group, but it was imperative that they actively engaged with employees on the issues.

Using feedback from the results the company agreed to action plans at a local level to commence improvements. By 2009 the wages spent on the actively disengaged group had dropped to £31m. Store teams that have had an improvement in engagement versus those that have stayed still or gone backward slightly achieved a to sales increase which can translate into an average of in profi t improvement. The range in scores within the same business and culture is greater than that seen between countries – the biggest difference is down to the manager.

“Our mindset changed from ‘if we’ve got a lot of changes to make, then it’s going to be a diffi cult challenge’ to ‘the only way we’re going to manage all this change is by engaging people fi rst.’ We were determined to fi nd out how we could engage people with the change. We had to step up our volume of communication and be really honest about what we were doing and why – and do it in a way that brought people with us.”

Fraser Longdon, Head of Talent and Engagement at Kingfi sher

10 Gallup Consulting Management Journal, 12 January 2010. http://gmj.Gallup Consulting.com11 Fraser Longdon has subsequently become Director of HR and Change at B&Q China


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becoming more hybrid – four steps to success

It is important to note that people – if they have enough desire to make a difference in an organisation – can overcome many barriers put in front of them. Badly designed workplaces, poor management, inconsistent company vision and leadership are all realities of business today, but good people have a habit of getting heard. as Gallup Consulting’s Peter Flade says: “Although highly talented people can bust through these barriers, high performing organisations do an excellent job of identifying and deliberately removing these barriers wherever possible.”

as organisations such as those interviewed for this paper have found, changes to the workplace – even at local level and even in small areas – can make a significant difference to productivity and engagement. as Paul Farmer, CEO at Mind says:

“A lot of these things are not rocket science activities but are simply about where we work collaboratively to common cause, where we are making all the best use of the skill sets that we have within the organisation to deliver most effectively for our beneficiaries. We want to be able to have a structure in place that ensures we have an utter degree of reliance on each other to deliver our objectives in a way which is compatible with our organisation’s values.“

In the 2010 Hybrid Organisation paper, we outlined a 20-point overview of traits that successful, Hybrid organisations exhibit. These traits, combined, presented a succinct overview of the perfect Hybrid Organisation. However, the reality for many businesses is that they must take a piecemeal approach to changing their workplace, policies, the tools they provide and management strategy. For some organisations, becoming more Hybrid might be led from office design, for others it will be about technology, but for all organisations the journey will have to be planned carefully and rolled out across time. as GSK’s Colin King says: “You can’t do this sort of thing overnight.”

Putting specific tactics aside, the research for this year’s paper, has identified four critical areas of strategic focus where organisation can get the most traction when pursuing their Hybrid journey.


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1. Put people in touch with one another – the power of chance

Collaboration is, put simply, the ability for individuals to communicate with each other and work together in teams that cross the virtual and physical. Traditional organisational structure, lines of management and office design tend to encourage siloed working, where you sit in a defined team. However this doesn’t always generate the best outcomes. As Philip Ross of UnWork.com says: “Instead of just emailing your closest colleagues, a global petrochemicals company I have worked with began to use web discussion forums among its 110,000 employees. Very soon, it found that the best answers consistently came from people in the group you didn’t know. Surely that means you’ve got the wrong people in the room with you?”

as we noted in last year’s Hybrid Organisation paper, the concept of ‘chance’ is a very important element of organisational success:

“Designing and running a successful organisation is not an exact science… ‘chance’ is really important.” In the physical office environment, ‘chance’ means chance meetings, chance solutions to problems and an infrastructure that facilitates serendipity. Compartmentalised offices and over-complicated structures are giving way to open stairwells and ‘verticality’ where people are encouraged to move freely around the organisation. This is an extension of the water-cooler effect, where people can share ideas and have conversations outside the physical boundaries of the office walls.”

Shared workspaces, open stairwells, the removal of offices and technologies designed to bring people closer together are all features of a Hybrid Organisation. as Dave Coplin says of


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12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman13 Real-time signals of a person’s availability or willingness to communicate. The traffic light system in Microsoft Lync or instant messaging is such an example

Microsoft’s flagship Hybrid Amsterdam office: “We’re getting lots of individuals who are working on different projects with different backgrounds, different skills coming together simply because they’re using the same workspace, and that’s leading to some quite innovative outcomes.”

Innovation can come in a variety of forms. But collaboration – whether through technology, shared workspaces, or simply bumping into people on stairwells – is vitally important to encourage individuals and teams to solve problems quickly, make decisions and seize market opportunities.

as Philip Ross says: “Hybrid is a collision between social networking and work and the organisational structure. Innovation doesn’t spring from that moment of eureka in the bath anymore; it comes from what Stuart Kauffman12 calls the ‘adjacent possible’ where teams sweat together to drive new ideas and solve problems.”

Collaboration can be functional as well as serendipitous. as West yorkshire Fire & Rescue found, using technology to jointly create documents once and distribute many times frees up huge amounts of time for fire service staff to concentrate on their important day jobs. Utilising presence information13, social networking and discussion forums is also fast becoming the norm in people-focused organisations.

Peter de Winter of Philips sums up: “In a company like Philips you need the right people working in the right way – they need easy access to knowledge, they need to collaborate on new ideas easily and they need to work in an environment with the right tools that keep people in the business and attract highly skilled staff in a very competitive environment.”


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a collaborative, innovative and entrepreneurial environment requires certain tools and resources to be in place. The office environment must be fit for purpose, the company policies and culture must encourage individuals to work in the most appropriate and productive ways and technology has to be integral to making that happen.

This is where the original Hybrid Organisation premise continues to ring true: the Hybrid Organisation is one that approaches people, workplace and technology in equal measure.Philips, perhaps, is one of the strongest exponents of this approach, having created a Workplace Innovation team that comprises senior stakeholders from all three disciplines.

“Philips’ Workplace Innovation Programme was originally started from a real estate perspective as a cost saving and efficiency project with full support from the board of management,” says Philips’ Peter de Winter. “However, very quickly the programme started to bring in elements of HR and change management as the program is more than a change of office environment. The IT element was included as we understood that you need the right tools to help people work flexibly and in a collaborative way.”

At a physical level, Philips has turned itself from a business with fixed desks with desktop PCs and fixed telephones to a culture where everybody has a laptop. The only fixed desktops are for certain functions that require them. Mobile phones are also designed for the job at hand, so employees either get a standard mobile phone or a smartphone depending on their profile. Every office at Philips is wi-fi enabled and employees also can access systems remotely via a virtual private network – which encourages working in remote locations, on the road or at home, where appropriate.

2. give them the tools to do their job properly – and the proper tools


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This approach is what Philip Ross of UnWork.com calls ‘activity-based clustering’ – a model where people work collaboratively in a variety of locations depending on their working style and job in hand.

“Take the Microsoft office in Amsterdam,” says Ross. “It’s a building that’s a real-time representation of the work that’s been carried out, because it’s a very different model from where we are today – it’s a Hybrid model, it’s in flux, it’s much more ‘on-demand’.”

Traditional office status symbols of the mahogany desk, big chair, executive perks and a lovely office are largely anachronistic. However, organisations should be careful about the cultural and operational implications of office design and bright shiny objects such as social media and consumer technology in the workplace.

Allowing employees to use mobile technologies and flexible working practices requires a change in management attitude – which in itself can be problematic. But ‘consumerisation of technology’ as it has become termed can also lead to a disintegration of standardised process and potential increase in operational risk.

as Microsoft’s Dave Coplin says: “Many organisations clearly understand the potential of ‘consumerisation’ inside their organisation. They get that it creates more engagement with their employees, especially around their use of technology. They get that it fosters innovation as people feel empowered to use technology creatively to help them solve business challenges and deliver better service. But increasingly I’m seeing examples of organisations that try to jump to the answer without considering or implementing the principles that will make this approach


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Focus on the little things – they really matter

Paul Farmer comments that many of the tactics used to create change in his organisation “are not rocket science activities”. and it is amazing how, across the board in the organisations featured in this paper, relatively small changes to an office environment, policy, management attitude or culture can generate better employee engagement and productivity.

Getting the basics right should be one of the first places that organisations focus on when pursuing a Hybrid, people-focused strategy. as Gallup Consulting research shows, ‘the basics’ are primarily about having a good job and security, but they also extend into areas such as having the right materials and equipment, being allowed to do what you do best, receiving praise and having a sense that your opinions count14.

In the case of B&Q (see box out p.24) the fundamental shift in employee engagement was not because of complicated policies, new technologies or office redesign – it was because employees were being consistently communicated with and directly involved in group level decisions. This is particularly important if an organisation is under pressure because of poor performance, or, as in Mind, the workforce demographic is particularly sensitive to change.

“We have a responsibility to promote a healthy workplace, especially as over 50% of our staff have experienced mental health problems,” says Mind CEO Paul Farmer. “Healthy working is all about some very simple things like good management, good support for our line managers and good policies and structures for employees. Part of that is about the office environment and the tools we give staff.”

Sometimes, even the smallest changes can have a profound impact on productivity and engagement. Macquarie Bank, for instance, spent a lot of time talking about the types of food

successful year after year. Net result: short-term gain, long-term pain.” a badly planned roll out of consumer devices and technologies – what Coplin refers to as ‘trinkets’ – could prove expensive, culturally dangerous and risk falling at the first hurdle. “Worse still, that will fool people into thinking that consumerisation and a Hybrid approach “failed”. Then we’ll be back where we started – expensive, constrained desktops, workspaces and structure that provides a far worse experience than the one we enjoy in our personal lives,” says Coplin.

a Hybrid approach is about selecting and deploying the right tools in the right way – taking into account the organisational business model, working styles and different types of employee. Sometimes, this may be predicated on a change in environment – as with Macquarie Bank. Sometimes this will be about changing collaboration technologies and access to information (West yorkshire Fire and Rescue) and sometimes it may be a complete overhaul in the way the organisation operates – from an IT and office perspective with people at the centre.

14 The Gallup Consulting Q12 methodology, http://www.Gallup Consulting.com/consulting/52/Employee-Engagement.aspx


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and drink they were going to offer in the shared refreshment areas in its new office in the City of London. If the coffee was right, then the people would stay in the building rather than waste time looking for the right coffee shop. For West yorkshire Fire & Rescue, posting a ‘for sale and wanted page’ on the organisation’s new collaboration platform, encouraged people to engage with the system in a way that delivered benefits for them personally as well as professionally.

These are classic cases of organisations understanding and addressing the needs of its people, from the very basics up. If you get the small things right, the grand vision will be easier to deliver.

4. Manage by outputs – drive trust and empowerment in the workplace

There was a time that flexible working was nicknamed “shirking from home” by the less enlightened business leaders. and, while there will always be people who take advantage of flexible working hours for their own benefit rather than the organisation’s, a system of management by outputs rather than inputs is one that consistently yields better results.

Good management boils down to trust – one of the four key elements of strong leadership. a system of management is one that understands that people have different working styles; it allows people to collaborate and come up with new ideas, it allows people throughout the organisation be heard.

There are obviously some limitations in the types of job that can be managed by outcomes rather than inputs – such as security, governance-related roles, etc. However, as Peter Flade says, in general, an outcome-measured organisation is achievable and more productive.

“Most jobs can be managed by outcomes, but within certain corporate parameters such as timings and budgets. If I allow people to get there in their own way at their own speed, it tends, over time, to be desirable.”


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as with the other elements of change management, the managers within the organisation – how they manage their teams and individuals – are the lynchpin for success. Most difficult, yet most importantly, in an organisation that is structured to promote collaboration and entrepreneurialism, managers have to be prepared to accept mistakes.

“You have to promote an effective failure regime, acknowledging that mistakes will happen and understand how to how to resolve them,” says BDO’s Peter Hemington. “Resilience and agility is aided by the ability to listen and learn; you have to have positive feedback loops built into the organisation.”

Promoting trust, of course, is not just confined to working styles and flexi-time. Strong leadership, as we have seen, has trust at its core – the ability to empathise with and support people who have to go on the Hybrid journey with you.

as Graeme Leach of the IoD says: “There’s the vision that you can identify with – that comes from good leadership. Then there’s the trust reciprocated from the organisation. You need both.”

Paul Farmer of Mind says this can be as simple as understanding that new technologies and approaches must be flexible and adaptable to support various working styles: “We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that people are different. The same applies in the workplace. We’re trying to give some sort of framework but within that we try to allow quite a lot of flexibility and different ways of doing things.”

In this way, success is the combination of three elements: strong leadership, the right tools and a management layer that supports change in a people-focused way. This last point – as we shall see in the next section of this report – is a fundamental stumbling block in many organisations.


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Building a culture of trust - How Nuffi eld Health’s HR department is facilitating the organisational vision

as the UK’s largest trading charity and a company committed to joined up healthcare, Nuffi eld Health, is embarking on an ambitious project to create a corporate environment that embodies healthy living, in all its forms. The initiative is being lead by the charity’s Human Resources and Organisational Development Director, Marcus Powell.

“Our HR strategy is driven by Nuffi eld’s brand values,” says Powell. “Our aim is to articulate the people dimension of our corporate vision: “health as it should be” through our core aims to be ’Passionate’, ‘Caring’, ‘Independent’ and ‘Enterprising’.”

In place of traditional HR policies, Nuffi eld health plans to roll out core principles as opposed to traditional policies. These are designed to outline what employees should expect and demand from the organisation, what the organisation needs them to demonstrate in return, and where HR will focus in order to bring the principles to life.

Nuffi eld’s principles:

• We focus relentlessly on people development - a commitment represented by the share of Nuffi eld’s surplus that we devote to the Nuffi eld Academy [a new centre of excellence for employee training and development].

• We trust our managers to be at the centre of people management & we cheer them on.

• We hold a mirror up to the organisation so that people can decide whether and how to change.

• We assume that employees are to be trusted, not policed.

• We encourage frank, appropriate and helpful conversations and communicate in plain English.

• We provide simplicity not complexity, structure not bureaucracy.

• We keep the business safe, doing the fundamentals well.

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While the Nuffi eld approach to people and HR is in its infancy, Powell believes that it will create a major shift in the way Nuffi eld is seen by its stakeholders. “We want to create an organisation that refl ects our values, one where our people are valued and also an organisation that is the envy of our competitors.”


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The ‘Bump’ Organisation

Macquarie bankTurning a structured business into a collaborative workplace

Banking is a traditional business based on complex systems, fixed workplaces and high levels of competition. When time really is money, the ability to get employees working more efficiently can provide a significant uplift in revenues and competitive advantage.

But it’s not all about money. Macquarie Group’s retail headquarters in Sydney has embarked on an ambitious programme of redesigning its Banking and Financial Services Group workplace to create more flexible and agile work environments, and imbue employees and clients with a sense of dynamism.

Macquarie’s Director of Design, anthony Henry, says the Banking and Financial Services Group workplace at Macquarie supports a wider leadership vision to make employees and clients feel empowered and engaged. “If people can’t connect visually, then they rarely connect at all,” says Henry. “We have a leadership vision that promotes collaborative working styles which ultimately improves the service we offer to clients. We have to walk the talk, and the office design is a symbol of our intentions.”

Macquarie, starting with its 1 Shelley Street office in Sydney 2009, has been on a mission to redesign its office spaces to encourage collaboration, chance meetings between employees and a workspace that is attractive for current and prospective employees.

At 1 Shelley Street, fixed desks are redundant. Shared work areas are designed to accommodate different working styles – or ‘activity-based working’ – and people are encouraged to move around the business. Meeting rooms have also been opened up with glass and are brightly lit and coloured spaces that stimulate visually and underpin the organisation’s core values of teamwork and transparency.

The move from fixed to shared workspaces has also saved Macquarie millions of dollars in spatial efficiency and energy costs. Henry says that up to of desks at any one time in the

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL Three:

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old offices could be empty, and so the use of shared desks and laptops mean that more people can occupy the same office.

The 1 Shelley Street project was very well received, and many of the ideas were further refined in its recent London project, where the Group moved its employees from two locations to a single office in the heart of The City. In doing so, Macquarie has removed segregating floors and created a central atrium or (‘Information Highway’ as Henry calls it) with a bright red staircase – a literal red-thread running through the organisation. This is surrounded by open meeting rooms and shared spaces where employees can get refreshments and meet informally.

“When you walk into most financial services organisations, you don’t get a sense of the work

that’s done in them,” he says. “Buildings are segregated into floors with teams often straddling

different floors, with little movement between them. Businesses just don’t fit into neat boxes,”

he says.

Some of the most important decisions during the project were simple and cultural, for example the type of coffee, fruit and refreshments available to all employees. For the 1 Shelley Street project, involvement of the end users was critical to the change management process. The project team ran workshops with all staff, which included acting out scenarios that were raising questions with staff, such as the perceived rush for desk space each morning. The humorous and engaging approach to testing the office design really helped to iron out any challenges. A pilot was also established in preparation for the move, with the business head being one of the first participants in the new way of working.

“Two independent studies have shown very positive results in terms of engagement,” Henry says. “But for me the fact that of people in the first three months showed their friends or family round the offices is the most pleasing indication that people are engaged and proud of the company they work for.”

While the project has been led on workplace and infrastructure, Henry says that office and workspace isn’t the be-all and end-all of organisational change. “We are embarking on a continuous change management programme where creating a connected physical workspace will lead to a connected virtual environment, connected technology and connected people,” Henry says. “Offices are a powerful symbol of organisational change and help get people engaged on the wider journey.”

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL Three: The ‘bUMP’ OrganisaTiOn

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The ‘Untraditional’ Organisation

West yorkshire Fire & rescue serviceUsing technology to help employees focus on what they do best

West yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service is responsible for providing services to two million people in local communities and businesses in the region. While the primary focus of the organisation is saving lives, the business of running the service efficiently required an improvement in collaboration and information sharing between internal departments and employees – even though the physical structure of the organisation is difficult to alter:

“People think that fire services are all about people ringing bells and squirting water – and a large part of our service is about that – but we also have to cope with huge amounts of paperwork, certification and admin,” Stone says.

The vision for the project, which was driven from IT and ratified by the management team, was to ultimately remove paper form the organisation. This, Stone says, would allow people to reduce their administrative burden, remove duplication of effort and allow employees to focus on what they do best. “People don’t join the service to fill out bits of paper,” he says.

The initiative needed to be mindful of the geographically dispersed structure of the service, with 48 fire stations covering an area of 800 square miles. While the physical workspaces of a fire service are difficult to alter – fire stations are designed for a specific purpose – the technological infrastructure could be improved. In this way, Stone and his team are using IT to help oil the wheels of the organisation without changing the workplace structure.

“Work is often thought about as a location – it isn’t,” says Stone. “Work is an activity that produces an outcome. In our case, we shouldn’t want people sitting at desks or sitting in cars for hours on end trying to manage documentation. They would be much more productive if they could access all the information they need through the internet.”

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a new digital information hub called ‘WyFireSpace’ – built on Microsoft SharePoint – gives West yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service a central location for all of its content assets and information for the first time. Whereas documents were once printed out, annotated by hand, circulated and amended, all information is now made accessible to different employees and department 24 hours a day through the cloud.

Stone says the benefits of using technology have ranged from improved security to reduced waste to better engagement and focus in the organisation. On the IT side, the service once had eight or nine different ways of accessing information, it now has one – which reduces costs, and improves efficiency. It also means that employees collaborate better, share information and can work more flexibly – something that is very ‘untraditional’ in the public sector.

“You can’t have firefighters taking fire engines away so they can work from home,” jokes Stone. “But there are parts of our organisation – especially in fire safety – that involve a lot of travelling to and from locations to conduct assessments and manage documentation. All that travelling and manual creation and approval of paper documents is dead time – you never get that back.”

Stone also cites issues where previously it could take weeks to query information because of the numbers of people and manual processes involved. Using Microsoft’s Lync presence software, FireSpace and instant messaging, they are bringing that down to minutes. “We have got over the cultural issues of bringing laptops into meetings and tapping away, because people have seen the power of having all the information at your fingertips.”

Looming public sector restructuring has been a major driver of more efficient systems. The brigades in the region are now using technology to work on sharing resources, such as specialist staff – essential in the wake of recent budget cuts across the public sector.

Historically, the public sector has been resistant to change, but by demonstrating the way that the systems can help individuals, Stone and his team have won over the naysayers. “Being in IT helps, because you can sit down with people and show them that there is a better way of doing things. No-one had ever done this before,” says Stone. “We have an immense passion for making this organisation work better, and now the people who are benefitting from the technology are getting that passion too. Once it clicks, you start getting people beating down the door to be involved,” says Stone.

Paying attention to little things has helped people accept and utilise the new systems. Creating a ‘for sale and wanted’ page on the system was immensely popular and got people used to typing in the URL of the intranet. Other simple changes have also had a big effect. “Using Lync to allow people to see what other employees across the region look like and where they sit in the hierarchy has also had great feedback,” says Stone.

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User adoption has already been rapid, with of the brigade’s 1,900 staff using the solution. Technology is also helping the fire brigade improve its efficiency by providing a development environment for business-critical web-based applications that can be accessed from computers or mobile devices. This also helps with day to day tasks such as booking meetings, sharing resources and accessing people’s diaries. It all adds up to an infrastructure that enables fire and rescue staff to do what they joined the service to do and not have contend with administration, policy documents and bureaucracy.

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Stuck in the middle: Barriers to successchallenges in middle management and medium-sized businesses

The old cliché says the middle child is often the most problematic. and so it would seem in the context of the Hybrid Organisation. While it is essential to have strong leadership and a mobilised workforce to drive entrepreneurial thinking and action, there are always people and bureaucratic processes that will stand in the way of change.

Barriers to organisational change often occur in the middle layers of business. Firstly there is the traditional blockage in middle management – those people who have to implement the company vision day-to-day, but often have most to lose if organisation hierarchies are removed. Second, is the peculiarities in structure of those companies that sit in between the smallest and largest organisation – the problem middle-children of business.

Middle management and winning over the naysayers

Company visions need to engender a positive response from employees, customers, from stakeholders. a Hybrid, people-focused strategy is all about the ability to be heard, make a difference to the organisation or make best use of your skills – all without being encumbered by organisational structure. This is compelling on paper, but as Peter Flade of Gallup Consulting says, the most enlightened vision, the best resources and the most motivated junior workforce is not enough.

“hybrid is about realising a vision at all levels of the organisation. but many businesses have bureaucracy and people – usually in middle management – that want to enforce their own processes. The hybrid Organisation unblocks that layer, allowing the vision to come to a reality.”

Graeme Leach, Institute of Directors

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“The fulcrum through which all organisational innovation happens is your supervisor or manager. We talk about organisations being nimble, or resilient or allowing opinions to be heard. But all of that happens or not, or is destroyed or not, at the manager level. People like to join fast growing companies, supportive organisations and sexy brands, and almost always they leave because of poor managers. There is a powerful study in the British public sector where it’s said that people who work for a bad manager had a higher chance of dying from a heart attack.”

This final point is a stark reminder or the realities of many businesses and organisations. People often get promoted into management positions because of their business skills or time served with an organisation – they rarely get promoted because they are good managers. The impact of a Hybrid strategy, where organisational boundaries are blurred and lines of communications shortened can cause confusion and even fear among the middle management layer.

Peter de Winter of Philips sees push back and active disengagement with change as inevitable, but addressable; “Change management studies show that before a change project starts about

of employees fully embrace new ways of working, about are neutral, but there are who are actively against change. The middle management layer – or the ‘clay’ layer of the

business – is critical. Often, they are the managers who don’t like the idea of having their office taken away from them and they often manage by control instead of by results. All that we can do is try to take them on the journey with us – identify them and involve them directly.”

De Winter says there will always be some people who will not change. However, with many of the others you have to first understand that they will cause challenges, you have to understand who they are and where they are and then you must involve them in the process.

Strong leadership and vision will only get you so far – you have to ensure maximum engagement across the organisation. as Graeme Leach of the Institute of Directors comments: “The Hybrid Organisation is much closer to the vision than the process and across all levels of the organisation. If you allow that middle management bureaucracy to enforce its own processes, then you have problems. The Hybrid organisation takes out that layer and gets people tied to the ultimate vision of the organisation and supports them with the right tools and resources to achieve it.”

you must, of course, do this in a considered way. as Colin King of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) says, everyone is different. “We want to create an organisation that is attractive to prospective employees as it’s a war for talent out there. However, GSK is a mixture of different business and people with different attitudes. You have to be sensitive to what is driving those people.”

If done correctly, however, change can deliver remarkable results. as anthony Henry of Macquarie has found with its new office design.

sTeP Three On The hybrid jOUrney: sTUcK in The MiddLe: OVercOMing barriers TO sUccess

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“Two independent studies have shown very positive results in terms of engagement,” Henry says. “But for me the fact that of people in the first three months showed their friends or family round the offices is the most pleasing indication that people are engaged and proud of the company they work for.”

If you can take people on the journey with you, then you create a snowball effect, where change gathers momentum. as Darren Stone of West yorkshire Fire & Rescue, says: “We have an immense passion for making this organisation work better, and now the people who are benefitting from the technology are getting that passion too. Once it clicks, you start getting people beating down the door to be involved.”

Change management should be a collaborative activity, not solely pushed upon people from the top down.

Medium-sized businesses with large-sized problems

The Hybrid Organisation is one that promotes and facilitates an entrepreneurial culture. For small companies, this may be about building networks of influence that can deliver ideas quickly to market. For large organisations it is often about enabling better flow of ideas and knowledge within the organisational structure to reduce time to market and better engage employees. However, it is often at the middle layer of ‘medium-sized’ organisations where the most tension is felt – especially if they have grown quickly. These organisations can become stifled by process and linear chains of command, leading to internal tension and loss of productivity. as BDO’s Peter Hemington says: “I spend a lot of time working on transition ownership, often of businesses that have been founded by individuals or entrepreneurs. When they have grown quickly or been involved in an M&A or a private equity deal then that leads to a


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change in ownership, a change in management and change in culture.“

Hemington says that new management in growing businesses tends to come from big organisations and so managers make the organisation more structured through the use of policies, processes and systems. Some of this is necessary for governance purposes, but it can also stifle the very things that made the organisation successful in the first place.

“First, management discover that it’s actually not quite as simple as all that putting all those structures and systems and processes because the businesses doesn’t have the culture to support them,” Hemington says. “Then, after a while you often watch them starting to unpick the structures and systems and processes that they’ve put in, because they want to get back to an entrepreneurial structure where people can learn from each other, come up with great ideas and make decisions without having to have formal meetings.”

as long ago as 2007, Microsoft and a think tank called the M-Institute explored the notion of Middle Child Syndrome in business – the fact that growing businesses often get constrained by process and a lack of attention and support from policymakers and suppliers.

as the SME journalist Jenny Little wrote in the Mail on Sunday on the subject: “Being the middle child is not easy. Your older sibling is often bigger, louder and impossible to ignore. And the baby of the family frequently gets much of the attention. So it is with business. While Britain’s largest companies dominate the headlines and smaller enterprises get the lion’s share of advice and


http://www.m-institute.org/m_institute/empowering-medium-enterprise-introduction.html

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government funding, medium-sized firms – which drive the economy – often seem invisible and are left to fend for themselves.”

Some conclusions that we can start to draw here include that medium-sized businesses differ from small-businesses primarily because they start to become more complicated in terms of size and scope and so disassociate ownership from professional management, and start to look for outside help and advice (in terms of IT as well as business support). People issues are also a key challenge for these businesses as these companies need to hire more staff that not only can do the job, but also fit the cultural ethos of the company as it was when small. That is if they can find enough skilled people in the first place – a key challenge that many Hybrid Organisations try to overcome by making themselves attractive workplaces to prospective employees.

To a certain extent, the plight of the medium-sized or growing business is felt across the spectrum. Ensuring an entrepreneurial approach is a concern for organisations across all types of business and all sectors. a Hybrid approach can deliver a more agile, nimble and entrepreneurial workforce, but the way that this is delivered will be different for each organisation to meet the specific challenges of its business model, strategy and external challenges.


a Champion for Middleweights, Mail on Sunday, 21 January 2007

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The ‘People-first’ Organisation

MindEnsuring internal structures match external vision, while supporting the specific needs of stakeholders

Mind is the UK’s leading mental health charity. Based in East London, it has grown steadily in recent years, currently employing 180 people and turnover of £31m. The charity campaigns to improve services for people with mental health problems and provides advice and support. With mental health issues gaining greater prominence and understanding in mainstream media and the public consciousness, the charity has an important part to play in changing attitudes, tackling discrimination and empowering people with mental health problems to speak out.

Katherine Gardiner has worked for Mind for 14 years, and now holds the position of the charity’s Director of Finance and Resources. Her role, along with Mind CEO Paul Farmer and the board is to rethink the way that the charity operates to best match its external vision with the internal structures and organisation.

“It is a hugely exciting time,” says Gardiner. “We are in the middle of drawing up our strategy for the next four years. In it we are spending more and more time looking at our people, our HR policies and the resources we have in place to make sure we reflect our values.”

Mind’s operations are made up of numerous offices across England and Wales including two bases in London, two in Manchester and one in Cardiff. It also employs some staff that specifically work from home and tries to offer home working opportunities for those that need it. Over 170 local Mind associations are affiliated to the organisation and together they helped over 280,000 people last year providing a diverse range of services from counselling and advocacy to ecotherapy gardening projects. The charity also has a network of over 100 retail units.

The two London offices are separated by a pub, Gardiner and Farmer joke that the walk from one office to another should be a “recipe for heaven”, but, in reality it can make working life a challenge for teams that need to work closely together on projects. The charity is growing

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL 5:

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too, with more staff coming on board to work on projects such as Time to Change and Ecominds. as part of its new strategy, Mind hopes to move to new premises in London that can accommodate its changing needs, promote integrated working and provide a more mentally healthy working environment for employees.

“We have a responsibility to promote a healthy workplace, especially as over 50% of our staff have experienced mental health problems,” says Farmer. “Healthy working is all about some very simple things like good management, good support for our line managers and good policies and structures for employees. Part of that is about the office environment and the tools we give staff.”

As well as the proposed London office move, Mind is looking at implementing cloud technologies such as Microsoft Office365 and mobile working to give more flexibility, improve communications with its network and reduce reliance on fixed infrastructure.

While resources for change are difficult to come by for most organisations, charities face particular issues as budgets are small and there is pressure to invest money where it will work best directly for beneficiaries. Proving the link between workplace and effectiveness is a difficult issue to resolve. While large organisations can afford extensive employee engagement surveys and analysis, Mind has limited resources for this.

“We’re very mindful that we are a charity and have to make sensible decisions about how we spend our money. Moving and investing in our ICT is quite expensive and disruptive. So how do we weigh up the fact that it’s going to be more beneficial for us? At the end of the day, we firmly believe that people working together better will help to achieve Mind’s mission,” says Gardiner.

a big concern for Mind’s management is how to effectively manage change in the organisation and gain stakeholder buy-in for new ways of working.

“Take our beneficiaries - or customers if you like,” says Farmer. “Many of them want us to be contactable 24/7 as mental health is not a 9/5 experience. Others are happy to continue to interact with us through paper surveys. So while we are developing strong social media communications channels, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that people are different. The same applies in the workplace. We’re trying to give some sort of framework but within that we try to allow quite a lot of flexibility and different ways of doing things.”

hybrid OPeraTiOnaL MOdeL 5: The ‘PeOPLe-FirsT’ OrganisaTiOn

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Resilience is realisableThe common theme running through each of the case studies featured in this report and the findings of the Advisory Board is that Hybrid is about building a resilient, outcome-focused organisation that captures the potential of people. In some cases, organisations want to generate more revenues, in others it is about encouraging innovation and ideas sharing, and in some it is simply improving employee happiness and engagement with all the associated intangible benefits that brings.

There are several ways to measure Hybrid business success. Some are financial (sales, profitability, cost of capital); some are driven out of Human Resources (employee engagement); and others are owned and managed by other functional disciplines (market share, operational efficiency, research and development). As we have seen in the context of this paper, however, that there is no single measure of company performance that takes into account the positive benefits of leadership, a focus on people and the intangible outcomes of innovation, productivity and collaboration.

It is not good enough simply to say that customer focused organisations are born that way and hence it is too difficult for others to change. As we have seen, there are significant benefits – both tangible and intangible to be had from workplace innovation, addressing office environment, implementing technology and thinking about people first.

Proving the link between a people-focused business strategy and organisational success is very difficult to do – whether you are the largest multinational or smallest charity – they share the same issues about quantifying success. yet they still do it because they believe it, no, they know it, to be right.

Katherine Gardiner, the Finance and Resources Director of mental health charity Mind, says that sometimes you just have to make decisions because you know them to be right: “We’re very mindful that we are a charity and have to make sensible decisions about how we spend our money. Moving and investing in our ICT is quite expensive and disruptive. So how do we weigh up the fact that it’s going to be more beneficial for us? At the end of the day, we firmly believe that people working together better will help to achieve Mind’s mission.”

a reliance on gut feel to determine the appropriateness of a Hybrid strategy to people, workplace and technology doesn’t get over the problem of the naysayers. Those organisations, as Gallup Consulting’s Peter Flade points out, that see employee engagement as a trade-off for

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profitability don’t make decisions in this way – especially in uncertain economic times

Through the case studies in this report, we have shown that these obstacles are inevitable, but can be overcome with the right mixture of leadership, vision, tools and changes to the basics of an organisation.

This paper showcases the importance of entrepreneurial behaviour, but the output of innovation in workplace structures differs from organisation to organisation. Macquarie wants to promote better productivity, Philips’ Workplace Innovation Programme is designed to drive innovative behaviour and ideas, and some organisations such as Mind simply want to bring everyone under one roof so they can better manage a single work environment that is supportive and open. It all boils down to people and how they fit into the organisational business model in a seamless and appropriate way.

People who work in high-end financial services know they will be expected to work long hours in high-pressure environments – and they often get rewarded as such. Those working in small charities require more flexible and supportive environments and those in mission critical roles such as a fire service do not want to be distracted by unnecessary administration and process.

But one thing is true for all. For people to work effectively and continue to add value to customers and their organisations, they need to feel that they are managed well, are uninhibited by their work environment and are recognised for their role in business success.

Organisations must remember the human element. all employees are different and technology should not be used to paper over the cracks within an organisation. a holistic approach where people, workplace and technology are considered in unison stands a much better chance if building a resilient Hybrid Organisation.

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