Create Your Own Work Style

As business leaders it's important to understand the wants and needs of your people at work. When these wants and needs change as they go through life, being able to support them in their personal circumstances where possible builds trust and loyalty.

How do business leaders learn to trust their employees to work remotely? What is the right balance or formula to ensure that it will be successful for the organisation?

These are traditional common approaches that are beginning to be carried out by business leaders today:

• Working in an specific location / office for a pre-arranged time
• Contractors/freelancers and people on probation must come into the office while other full-timers can WFH indefinitely  
• Remote first
• The expectation of everyone WFH until a specific date, then reverting to a pre-COVID expectation

The above methods are rigid structures that limit flexibility and may not be the best way to deliver great outcomes.

We believe there is a better way. The post-COVID world and younger workforce demands more, and why shouldn’t they?

The people at Sysdoc UK are intelligent and driven. They have careers that they care about developing, skills they want to continue building, and customers they feel passionate about helping. So, implementing a very rigid approach to how work gets done may not get the best results. Having said that, an element of structure is good. New graduates may thrive in a structured environment to begin with.

Striking the right balance

Everyone creates their own lifestyle. For most of us there’s an element of routine and flexibility, allowing us to catch what life throws at us. Why not trust your people to do the same at work?

At Sysdoc UK, we help people create their own WorkStyle from the moment they join us. If it works for our customers, our manager/team and for ourselves, we are trusted to make the call on where, when, and how we work.

The challenges

When applying for a new role, it’s attractive to know that you will get to decide your own WorkStyle. Yet, it’s understandable that when starting out, the immediate freedom of creating personalised parameters and structure can be daunting. This is where our managers step in.

Our managers are critical to helping individuals create their own WorkStyle successfully. This also enables us to create a structure of diversity. It’s a matter of understanding the expectation of engagement levels from the internal teams and customers. Considering some of our customers are global with differing time zones, this is a great starting point. Individuals can then overlay their lifestyle, personal and professional goals to find that all important sweet spot.

As business leaders in a post-COVID world, we must allow freedom for our people to decide when and where they work. It’s important to support them engage with each other, their customers and the organisation while achieving their life goals.

This is a broader culture play, one that doesn’t adhere to ‘one size fits all’. It’s easy to create one streamlined structure, yet the world is changing, and we need to change with it! Organisations that mandate one working structure risk alienating talent that struggle to conform in this current environment.

Our Advantage

The hustle and bustle of an office can come with reduced productivity alongside the advantages of collaboration and culture. I spoke to people at Sysdoc UK about what they had learned from extended WFH during lockdown. The key themes were:

• It’s possible to get so much more done at home without interruption. Post-COVID people who never managed to WFH effectively before, now realised the benefits when they need to focus and be productive.
• They missed the people they work with and the social side of the office culture, and why wouldn’t they – it’s a blast!
• Everyone has found ways to collaborate, but we’ve all realised that there are times when being in the same place together just helps the ideas flow.

Fast forward to 2022 and beyond, offices need to pull people back from the routine they’ve created at home knowing that the old set-up isn’t going to cut it. More space dedicated to collaboration and more time dedicated to socialising is what we are setting up for our post-COVID world.

When People’s Lifestyle Changes

I was once told that as a leader you should understand the wants and needs of your people. When these wants and needs change as they go through life, being able to support them in their personal circumstances where possible builds trust and loyalty.

That’s one of the key reasons we have created our WorkStyle approach.

When people find their personal circumstances changing, we are ready to help them flex their WorkStyle to accommodate those changes as much as possible. Knowing that the needs of customers and managers are met, we give maximum flexibility and autonomy to our people.

The perfect working policy you could have, is to not have one at all. It’s as simple as that! It’s time to embrace the ultimate flexibility, based on TRUST. This is only possible if there are great leaders which support their teams to find the sweet spot within this model. Our size is our advantage, lets lead the way, we can be different and agile.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for everyone. Some people want more structure. Without structure they struggle to manage their careers and skills development without more of a centralised and traditional human resource or business support function. But increasingly, we are fishing in a talent pool full of younger and diverse generations who want more freedom, to blur the lines of Lifestyle and WorkStyle.

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