When the world retreated behind closed doors to slow the spread of Covid-19, it resulted in some humorous work moments, like the lawyer who showed up to a virtual court in Texas with a kitten filter turned on, or the political science professor whose virtual BBC interview was interrupted by his kids. But it also provided an opportunity for society to reevaluate how we work, how we engage people and how we create value. There are lots of different ways to cut the cloth and build a hyper powerful, efficient and successful workforce, and perhaps one silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic is that remote working, the gig economy and digital collaboration are much better understood and utilised now.
For Objective, it was an opportunity to further develop our competitive advantage. Objective was founded on remote, flexible and borderless working to build a resource efficient model that allowed us to benefit from the richness of the gig economy. This gave us a competitive advantage come Covid-19 – we already had the systems in place and we were well positioned to ride the wave. With everyone being forced to shift their mindsets about remote working and the gig economy, we looked to continually improve and hone our ways of working even further.
We’re proving it’s possible to tap into strong and competitive human resources which, when connected together, can adapt to business needs, create drive and momentum, accountability, speed and fulfillment, without being wedded to the traditional 9-5, FTE employment model.
Since the Industrial Revolution, workplace models have been focused on inputs – are people turning up for 40 hours a week? We’ve inverted how we visualise and measure success and productivity to focus first on the outputs. By rejecting the notion of a 40 hour working week, we shift our focus away from being about how busy we can be and how many hours we’re working, to how effective we are, who the best person is for each job and ensuring the work we’re doing delivers the results we’re aiming to achieve.
Once we understand our needs based on the outputs we want to deliver, we then resource accordingly, offering up different ways to work with us. By understanding the skills mix needed to deliver, be it core, supplementary or ad hoc, we can flex our thinking about who we need to build breadth and depth of skills and leverage those skills across projects based on their needs in a more agile and freeform manner. Core skills are those that are required daily or weekly and are fundamental to a project or the objectives we’re trying to achieve. Supplementary skills are those used on a weekly or monthly basis. And ad hoc skills are those that might be a monthly or quarterly requirement and are usually really specialist or technical skill sets. You can read more about our agile Marketing Stack model here.
So how do you use a more flexible and variable workforce structure but maintain the focus and move seamlessly together to get things done? It’s a bit like a tandem bike. By connecting two riders so they can ride together with both riders’ power put through the same transmission, riding tandem is fast, efficient, fun and gives you a sense of teamwork. And like riding a tandem bike, achieving efficiency and effectiveness of a more agile workforce needs to be focused on the same goal to achieve the desired outcomes.
Operating as an agile, remote-based workforce, we’ve had to adapt and build the right processes and structures that support us to move at pace. Here are some of things we’ve learnt as we’ve harnessed and refined the power and benefits of moving as one.
3,1,3,2
A challenge of outsourced working and a flexible structure is how you provide the unification of goals and work planning previously achieved by having everyone at the same location, at the same time.
When Objective first started we used the ‘tried and true’ method of setting three-year plans and annual plans. When any team is looking ahead at a three-year plan it can become really easy to start spinning too many plates at one time by anticipating what’s coming and trying to get ahead. We found that we underestimated what we could do in a year, and overestimated what we could do in a quarter.
To combat this, we’ve embedded a planning approach which we’ve coined the 3,1,3,2 model. It’s proved crucial for the pace and speed at which we want to move and for clarity. The objective of the model is to balance the dynamics of short term agility and pace, while ensuring we’ve done the due diligence that needs to happen up front so we don’t get lost in tactics.
- 3: Three year strategy. We look at where we are trying to get too. What are the critical components we’re going to have to change or implement for that vision to come to life.
- 1: The tasks that need to happen in the immediate year. Once we know those three-year components, we start to narrow the focus and prioritise what the next year looks like. What foundations do we need to build on each additional phase?
- 3: Quarterly focus. This is about making sure we double down on fewer, bigger, better initiatives. Mountains fragment focus, so rather than obsessing about the summit and how we get there, the focus is now on how we get to the next few steps in the climb. At the start of each quarter we realign our workforce behind what we are specifically trying to do in that three-month period. We find that if we want to move at pace it’s vital to make sure that everyone is focused on a small set of objectives. And to do that frequently enough to avoid scope creep and a divergence from what matters most.
- 2: Bi-weekly sprints. This approach ensures that everyone working on a project moves in tandem. No one is a bottleneck and we can closely manage availability with outputs to work in sync. There’s also something powerful about focusing everyone for a two-week period on a very specific set of tasks and objectives. Not to mention the fulfilment of ticking off a few tasks at the end of a sprint. In our experience this increases the speed and efficiency at which we can execute tasks.
Accountability so everyone knows their role
Our more flexible and variable workforce structure has thrived because we’ve embraced complete transparency, including with our clients. At any one time, anyone in the business is able to see how we’re progressing. Being open is integral to creating a culture of inclusion, but also ensures everyone can move at pace towards a shared goal, particularly as different people dovetail in and out of a project at different times. We work by the mantra of ‘if this were my business’ and back our crew to make the calls they believe are best under that banner and with the clarity of our 3,1,3,2 approach to goal setting. Everyone knows exactly what we’re trying to achieve and why.
Having the right tools for the job
We’ve embedded a decentralised tech stack that supports our way of working and helps to overcome some of the potential barriers we might experience being fully remote to facilitate transparency and visibility. When selecting our tech stack we looked for tools that were open source, cloud-based, fully accessible and allowed real time collaboration from different locations.
We’ve found G-suite to be great for documents and everyone being able to work in one place. It also eliminates the risk of changes getting lost when a document is forwarded via email and updated by someone but not another person. We use Miro as a brainstorming tool, enabling collaboration on bigger picture thinking. Our workflows are run on Asana allowing for synchronisation and a focus on outputs. Every objective we’re chasing quarterly is recorded here and its progress tracked. Slack is our core tool for collaboration. Projects each have their own Slack channel to keep comms really clear. We check in regularly and focus on our culture via OfficeVibe and use WorkflowMax and Xero for tracking hours and invoicing.
Enjoy the journey
As we move forward by no means have we sussed out how to do it the right way. A core theme of Objective is continual iteration and improvement. Just like how we adapted in response to Covid-19, we look to continually improve and hone our ways of working. This journey of embracing a new model that focuses less on the inputs and more on the outputs is exciting and is driving a lot of energy for us and our crew. We believe that harnessing the power of moving as one has the potential to support and aid the small and medium sized market in New Zealand and globally to find a little more of that competitive advantage when coming up against large incumbents.
If you want to learn more about how you could apply this model of working, to better deliver on your businesses’ goals, get in touch.