How to Hybrid: Tools to Create Seamless Balance
The sudden mass transfer from office working to a hybrid work model hit the world quickly and hard. As our clients began to strategize their own models, they turned to our team for input in identifying what could work best for their teams’ specific needs. As designers who are constantly thinking about the spaces we move throughout and work in, we took the hybrid work model into our own hands and evaluated how the workspace can best function to benefit our clients and partners.
World, Meet the Hybrid Design Workshop
Cue to today. Our workplace design experts are designing spaces that cater to different organizations’ specific architectural and design needs globally, so why not extend that to helping them define their hybrid needs through a Hybrid by Design Workshop? We translated our in-person discovery workshops into an interactive, digital meeting space and along the way, have learned lessons about effective consensus building in virtual settings. The good news? It can work – and there can even be advantages when designed well. Keeping in mind the volatility of COVID-19, varying employee needs, and a need to better prepare for the future, our designers created a holistic model that caters to an enriched curated work from home environment, employees’ mental health, and the look, feel, and employee experience of the “new normal” office space.
A Sneak Peek Inside
Our designers found that the key to building successful hybrid work models and happy teams is to understand the overall objectives, policies, and culture of the organization, and keep those aspects at the forefront of the blueprint. Our workshop engages diverse organizational leaders from human resources to technology, facilities, and c-suite executives to build consensus. By engaging individuals with varying duties, stakeholders work together to co-create a tailored, prioritized action plan by level setting expectations, uncovering priorities, and looking at physical space and how that might change in a hybrid model.
In our workshop, we act as a neutral third-party, guiding clients through a series of pulse polls and into the brunt of the discussion: options from hybrid-model themes are voted on, debated, and prioritized, allowing for separation of baseline and innovative options, which would require further study. Through discussion, the prioritized options crystallize in alignment with cost and culture. Moving from ideas into space, shifts in the ways people work, and how that might influence design, are captured in a work modalities bubble diagramming exercise.
Benefits Beyond Design
This virtual workshop gives clients a platform to select options, prioritize, and affirm a solid framework for a formalized Hybrid Model Design Plan through the lenses of cost, culture, and values. From the unifying dialogue in the Design Workshop setting, hybrid plans that contribute to resiliency and togetherness are born.
We collaborated with our friends at Miro to bring you a sneak peek of the workshop.
