What to prioritise during your days working in the office vs WFH?

During the break I was chatting with my neighbour who was talking about his 2021 work reality.

He works in a big business and runs a team of 190.
His business  has now formally changed it’s working policy and factored the following WFH/WFO (work from office) ratio into its cost base:

No more than 2 days a week in the office for each person across the year.
Given that this is increasingly a reality for many of you, I’ve put together 5 principles that will help and the first principle I will talk about today:

Principle #1  – Prioritise teamwork and collaboration

The big idea here is that we want to think about the task and relationship aspects of your role and make sure we prioritise them to either the office or home in a way that works for you. The general rule is:

• Relationship – Office
• Task – Home

But there are a couple of exceptions and during lockdown many of us transferred all our meetings too virtual, so overtime you’ll need to slowly encourage the team and stakeholders to move to face to face again as people return to the office.

1. The first thing is to decide which days you will be in the office. I would recommend these are consecutive days which maximise the overlap with your team or the key customers or stakeholders that you need to interact with (ideally all of these groups). 
2. The second thing is to plan work differently between the office (WFO) and home (WFH). I would creating a framework that works for you but you may want to start with something like this:

• WFH
  • Tasks on my to do list that don’t require collaboration
  • Virtual meetings with 1 – 5 people on project delivery (my general rule is that workshop style or needs gathering meetings are best done face to face)
  • Team Meeting – practically, it’s unlikely you’ll get all your team in the office at the same time  and my experience tells me blended format meetings don’t work as well as having everyone virtual (of course if you can get everyone face to face then do it!)

• WFO
  • Meetings with stakeholders and customers
  • Project Needs or Buy In Meetings (essentially anything where you want interaction and conversation to influence or include someone in a project or idea)
  • Brainstorming – Creating with others

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

Next content, I’ll talk about Principle #2 – Make time for the water-cooler – hallway conversations.

Hope that’s been useful for you. If you want to talk about your team. Send me a message or leave me a comment down below.

Talk to you soon.

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