There's No Better Time for a New Way of Working

Bia Affonsno

There is much hype about new ways of working in organisations these days. What does new ways of working actually mean for your organisation though?

In order to explain what we, at Neu21, believe new and better ways of working mean, we have to take a step back to explain the reason why leaders around the world feel the need for change.

Scientific Management, also known as Taylorism, is a management theory, developed in the 19th century, that was brought to organisations in an attempt to create manufacturing efficiencies: to save time, costs and increase throughput. This meant that training and control of workflows were critical for the success of most organisations' production model. 

The key takeaway is that scientific management has left a legacy in organisations. Good or bad, organisations perpetuate this way of working, because they believe that efficiency will bring us the change organisations need to stay relevant in the market. 

 As complexity rises around the world, this legacy way of working - of using technical solutions, rigid training, policies and processes to fix complex problems, doesn't produce the same results as it once did. An organisation in itself is a complex system made up of creative and diverse people. Humans are social beings, born to collaborate, communicate and engage in problem solving.

With complex systems like organisations, we can't really predict exactly what happens when you introduce something new, but we are confident to say that there is an alternative way to produce meaningful work and stay relevant today; a way forward that is safe to try. 

Through our work with teams around the world, we found that there are four areas that need review when improving ways of working.

• Alignment

We often say that high-performing teams know the purpose of their work, understand where they are heading to and what their promise is to the organisation, and have an explicit set of values to help them to self-regulate and collaborate with each other. A good test is to ask a team member if they understand how their work contributes to the organisation's success. If the answer is "no", you know you've got some work to do.  

• Direction

This might seem intuitive for most leaders and teams, but you'd be surprised to know that most teams are going through the motions, reacting to incoming work, and reproducing the scientific management way of working. They receive instructions of what to do, they get it done, go home and repeat the next day. 

When working with teams, we co-design a direction for their work that is relevant to the team and organisation's purpose, vision and strategic focus. 

• Operating Rhythm

This is a simple and yet powerful change to the way teams work, but most organisations tend to get it wrong. They don't look at the alignment of their people or the clarity of direction of their work. Instead, they introduce 15-minute stand ups with a team that doesn't know how meaningful their work is. They put post-its on the walls and call themselves 'agile', for a lack of better word. 

An operating rhythm is a critical step in improving a team's ways of working. Rituals are vital to regulate the team's ability to effectively collaborate, remove constraints and get the right work done.

• Review

Have you ever seen a diary full of back-to-back meetings? If this is your case now, something needs to give. Reviewing a cycle, a project or how a team is working together is paramount for a team's success. Most teams we work with are in a loop of doing and endless meetings without escape. 

Making the time to pause and reflect is the key to improved ways of working and to ensure we don't fall back into the production and efficiency mindset of the 19th century. Most problems today are not fixed by relentless production, but by critical thinking and highly functional teams.

The Time is Now…

There's no better time to find new and better ways of working, remote, face-to-face or mix n’ match. Teams are craving for connection and to engage with your organisation. There's no magic bullet, but safe-to-try experiments that can be applied to any team in any organisation. 

Start small, start soon and keep iterating, because the journey to better ways of working brings a united and collaborative team that will take your organisation where it is striving to go.