Global hybrid — our next mode of working
This has been an extraordinary year of change. 2020 has become the world’s biggest remote working experiment. The consensus appears to be that it has increased productivity overall. A recent article on Business Leader cites that most businesses in the UK were able to transition within a week, that 31% of companies felt productivity has increased since remote working began with 81% suggesting the primary factor is less lost commuting time.
At ClearScore, adapting to different ways of working has been part of our DNA. Since 2015, we have gone through 5 different modes as shown below:
During each transition, technology has played a key part in making it a success. Let us review each in more detail and take a look at what changes are taking place as we move towards our next mode of working.
Mode 1 — Local and fully office (2015)
As a pre-launch startup, the primary focus was on speed to market and rapid decision making. Colocation was key to this. In a tiny office in Hammersmith, even meetings were rare given that you could just ask the person next to you. There was no need for video conferencing and even Slack was in its infancy. Even though everyone had laptops and all our productivity tools were cloud-based, it was rare to work from home as you would miss out on a number of key decisions that were being made verbally on a daily basis. Productivity was insane and this led to us being able to launch within 5 months.
Mode 2 — Local and mostly office (2016)
Following a successful launch, the objective was to move to more sustainable working practices and rapidly build a team that could quickly make our product a market fit. Not only did we need more office space, but to attract and keep the best talent flexible working was introduced. This meant that is was much more commonplace to occasionally work from home during the week. Slack had now become properly embedded into the culture with Slack video calls during standups to include those not in the office. Team meetings were still all done face-to-face in the office and for most of 2016, the entire team was UK based.
Mode 3 — Global and mostly office (2017–2020)
It was a transformative moment when ClearScore became a global team. This happened when we set up an office in Mumbai and we started working on the South Africa launch, our first international market. All our audio-video systems needed upgrading, each meeting room was kitted with a TV, microphones and Zoom was chosen to be our primary conferencing tool. Team meetings were now broadcast in real-time, to multiple offices, in different countries. Our infrastructure was also moved to the cloud which allowed us to create a platform that could be deployed into several global locations. We were still mostly office based with only around 10% working from home on any given day.
Mode 4 — Global and fully remote (2020 Q2)
Even though we were confident that we could adapt to working remotely, this was only ever put into practice with Business Continuity Tests. The COVID-19 pandemic changed all of that. Within just a few days, we had globally moved into a fully remote mode of working. It didn’t take long before home office systems were upgraded and everyone considered themselves to be a Zoom and Miro expert.
During lockdown, working days became a blend of mobile calls, Slack conversations, emails, hours of video conferencing and a lot of walking in parks. Our productivity metrics have all shown increases with remote working. However, social cohesion and collaboration, both key aspects of our culture, deteriorate with everyone constantly away from each other.
Mode 5 — Global and mostly remote (2020 Q3)
We have now entered a mostly remote way of working where many of us are coming in for a day or so a week to collaborate and socialise. The London Office has been repurposed for this with more breakout areas, a booking system and every desk fitted with a plug-and-play docking station.
This mode of working has its challenges but there are also opportunities. It allows entire functions to work in the office for the day together and enables different teams to collaborate in ways which just were not practical previously. It also helps to increase our Social Capital. According to Robert Putnam, this is measured by the amount of trust and reciprocity in a community or between individuals. When social connections between team members or co-workers from different departments are strong and numerous, there is more trust, higher information flow, collective action and happiness.
Our next mode — Global hybrid
At some point, it is inevitable that we are going to have to get comfortable with working in a true hybrid setup where at times there will be equal numbers of employees working in the office and remotely. This means that our technology will have to overcome any barriers that reduce our ability to collaborate in this mode.
We are currently looking at a range of different systems for this including smart video conferencing cameras, touch screen whiteboards, adaptive acoustic panelling and VR tech.
The move to global hybrid will require technology to reduce the friction between remote and colocation. I am super excited about moving into this new mode of working and confident that this will assist us in keeping our amazing culture.
