How "work buckets" can help you find the right hybrid working model

When I was at salesforce, I became frustrated with myself. There were times that I put in my calendar to do account planning, but I felt I didn’t have the focus for it. There were times I wanted to make cold calls to stakeholders I didn’t yet know, but didn’t feel the energy to pick up the phone. There were also times I came into the office, but I really just had to concentrate on building a proposal - yet my colleague’s (with their kind hearted intentions) distracted me by asking how I was, what I was doing over the weekend and If I still enjoyed living in the suburb I was living in. There were also times, I grew frustrated with how distracting it felt when I was working on something and a customer case would come in; seeming like the most urgent thing that ever happened in the history of our planet. I had a hard time figuring out the best way to do the million things I has to do. Everyone likes the feeling of working on the most important things, seeing them through and getting them done. I wasn’t doing enough of that.

One day, jacked up on coffee ? I used my mind mapping tool to try to simplify my job into “buckets” and “sub buckets”. Call it what you will, these buckets were intended to help me see the forest ???through the trees.

Drumroll the buckets ??

What I realised, was that my job fell into 6 main buckets (see the actual map below):

1. Creating
2. Planning
3. Analyzing
4. Learning
5. Cleaning
6. Connecting with humans

After I put this mind-map together, it became very that to me not only what part of my job the smaller activities i had to do (like raising a case of a customer) were related to; but also when I felt best doing them. For example, I learn best in the morning. So scheduling in my calendar to do some internal training after Lunch (amidst a glucose crash) was futile. I could block off 90 min and say to myself that this is creativity time, or customer connecting time. I could also pair my highest energy hours with connecting to customers for example. The highest impact area a sales person has. It allowed my to fend off distractions and justify why it made sense to do so when they came.

Equally important is that this helped me visualise when it made sense to go to the office, and when I needed my own undisturbed space for deep work.

Today, companies seem to be grappling with, and are extremely confused by what is the best approach to take in a hybrid, post covid environment. Why are they struggling? It’s likely because they have an army with different buckets and different sub buckets. And managing so many complex preferences with a broad brush is nearly impossible and will be met with resistance. At the time of writing (March 14/2023) many of these companies are trying to take this vast army of people, with many buckets and sub-buckets and shove them into a operating single policy. You can also call these buckets "duties" and how they are organised "personal preferences". It’s not fair to say this about all companies, but even modern enterprises who were once all in on remote work (especially in tech); are asking customer facing roles to be in the office 4/5 days per week. Guess what, one size fits all strategies rarely work.

Now, If you look at the Mindmap of an AE (assuming I had a pretty decent understanding of the job) you can see the 2 blue pills. I’ve highlighted those as pretty much the only two sub activities where it truly makes more sense (to me) to be in person over being remote. Do you agree?

This begs the question: Why are these companies asking people to go back into the office 3-4/5 days per week?

Here are 4 likely reasons:

1. Realestate cost on the balance sheet of the company
2. Managers do not know how to coach and manage remote teams effectively to a high performance standard
3. High inflation & looming recession fears = back to basics mentality “what has always worked in the past will work in the future”
4. C-levels have may have money, nanny's etc. and thus lack some empathy towards the average worker with fewer resources at their disposal to deal with kids, french bulldogs and long commutes from suburbs that are more affordable to live in.

Yet…there is no real data to show that back to the office is advantageous. To the contrary. Workers who work remotely consistently say that they are more productive across every meaningful publication from Gartner, McKinsey, Forbes, Gallup, Microsoft etc

So how can you use the bucket exercise? The bucket exercise could help workers discover for themselves what to focus on, when to focus on it, and finally - when it makes sense to be in the office. This should be done as a guided, self discovery exercise. Meaning the individual should do it on their own. Managers should then sit with each individual, and look at their buckets map to think through, together what the optimal hybrid mix is for them. To take it one step further, their team or even cross functional team should present to each other how they all work best. This will create collaborative empathy, and may also surface worker driven ideas that management has not thought about. These ideas can help guide when they see value to get together in person (like a deal war room if you are in sales) and when they wanna be left to quietly work from their home office.

A bonus for those who go this far ??

If you want build your won Buckets map - sign up free here - we'll email you when our buckets tool is released.