Founder of HSM Advisory, Prof. Lynda Gratton was recently interviewed in Worklife to share some of her thoughts on the future of work.

One of the key takeaways from the interview was the fact that design has a central role to play in ensuring that hybrid works for everyone.

The first part of the design challenge is designing your approach. According to Lynda, when it comes to hybrid “there are no best practices” Every organisation must go through the process of designing their unique signature approach. A culture of experimentation is crucial to achieving this. A fertile culture for hybrid working is one where people can cultivate and trial new ideas, and where leaders are not only open to hearing new perspectives but brave enough to make the leap from rhetoric to creation and implementation.

Leaders have a critical role to play when it comes to redesigning work – and must learn to interpret people’s needs and reimagine ways of meeting them. For example, does the fact that people miss serendipitous water cooler moments mean they need to be back in the office full time? Or are there other ways of nurturing their networks that could be just as effective – or even more so? How might reimagining the role of managers help people to do their jobs better?

To find the answers to these questions – and more like them – risks must be taken. Naturally, things will go wrong – and therefore a robust design mechanism which allows you to measure impact and learn from failure as well as success is crucial.

You can read the interview for Worklife here. 

Lynda Gratton’s latest book, Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone is the essential playbook for hybrid working. Order it from Amazon now.