Putting the why in hybrid

As you may have read here before, we moved Wilson Fletcher to a four-day-week-for-five days'-pay model almost two-and-a-half years ago now. Without going over old ground, I'll simply say that it has worked brilliantly, and we'll never go back.

Of course, then that virus landed and we became, like almost everyone else, a remote-working team for much of a year as well. As we all emerge, it's been fascinating to watch what the reaction to a return to work has been. You don't need to spend much time on LinkedIn to tune in to the (predominantly) negative vibe about going back to the office. I know of a good number of companies who have used the opportunity to give up their workplaces and become fully virtual teams. There are also plenty of companies large and small who are progressing towards a 'fully back to the office' model.

Ultimately, companies need to choose a model that aligns with their values as a business. As in all things, just doing what everyone else does is unlikely to be a success.

Unsurprisingly, I'm not reading about that aspect of these new working models – the 'why?' behind the 'what?' – and I think it's leading to a lot of the negativity.

Here at WF, we have made a choice that we believe aligns directly with our philosophy as a business. We're doing a 4dw, with two days as standard in the studio, and we're all trying to align those two days so that we all spend those days in the studio together. Some of the team live really close to the studio and choose to come in every day, and anyone can vary that pattern to suit project demands as long as the overall balance is about 50/50.

Fridays are still a non-working day; a personal day that the team can use flexibly. The only rule is that Fridays are there to make our four days better. Sometimes that's catching up on reading, sometimes it's a day out with the kids or an extended lie-in. Each person makes their own decision how best to use their Friday, each week. Once a quarter, the team spend a Friday together as a company day where we generally get a speaker in and then do some internally-focused activities. It's a day we all focus on making the company better, with plenty of socialising during and after.

When you do the maths, our team 'work' almost exactly 50% of the days in the year, and we pay them for 70%. After two-and-a-half years, we're 100% certain that we get better work done than we did before. Our version of 'hybrid', we believe, will continue the trend of enabling better thinking, which is what we obsess about.

We fully realise that we've chosen to adopt a model that some consider less attractive for them than a 'work where you like' approach, but it's a choice based squarely on our long-held view of what work should be like and why that's important.

We've always taken a stance that there shouldn't be a work-life divide that needs 'balancing'. We set up our company to do the work we want to do, in the way that we can do it best, with a team that we actually enjoy working with each day. We know that lively studio time working together is super-important to the creative thinking and spontaneity that underpin our work, and we equally recognise that 'quiet' days at home, without a commute, open up some extra hours for things like exercise, maximise focused time and can give us an environment to process and progress the work we need to do.

The massive shift in behaviour that the pandemic brought about has enormous advantages for us: we can now reliably connect with members of our client teams by video pretty much anywhere in the world, whether they're at home, in the office, or working from a beach hut in Guadeloupe. We, and they, can be anywhere and we can connect easily. Only a tiny fraction of them were video-call-capable 18 months ago, so it meant lots of physical travel and easy access to far fewer people. Now we can have those conversations from the studio or from home equally well.

However, we know how important working in-person with our clients is, and we cannot afford to lose what I'd call 'big canvas' working if we want to do our best work. As I type, a team from one of our long-standing clients is in our workshop room working with us on a futurestate design programme; inventing the future of their core business. I popped in after a couple of hours and there were already drawings and notes covering a 20 foot-wide whiteboard. As the work progresses, everyone can see everything at the same time. That expanse of ideas and concepts, seen as whole, is constantly sparking new ideas. You can actually watch it happening.

Contrast that with an equivalent remote session in Miro. One of the things I've really been conscious of recently is that despite being a fabulous tool for remote collaboration, and a lifesaver through lockdown, remote client teams are usually experiencing an equivalent working session on a tiny laptop screen. At any given time they can only see a piece of a piece of something, and can never consume the whole because zooming out makes everything too small to comprehend. It's a case of 'can't see the wood for the trees' on an epic scale.

So, for us, a 4dw + 50/50 studio/home model is, we believe, the optimal pattern. It enables us to do the best work we can in a way that places work-life quality, not some notion of competing work-life forces, at the heart of our day-to-day life.

I believe that if more companies set out their 'why?' when communicating their model of work, they'd have fewer dissenting voices amongst their existing teams and would stand a better chance of recruiting new people who will be happy to work there.

We know our model will not be for everyone, and that's fine. We've made a choice based on what we believe in as a company and we'll welcome new people to our team that share that philosophy. I think it's essential that companies' working models reflect them at the deepest level.

That's certainly what we've tried to do: if you're applying to us, you know where we stand, and, I hope, why we stand there.