Doing home office on a Friday was once for me the pinnacle of flexible working before Covid-19. Working in the comforts of my own home, drinking my own (arguably) better coffee, meant for me a nice break from the office routine. A break in the commute – work – commute routine what was my work week. And then Corona hit and suddenly I had more home office days than I ever asked for.

Fast forward two and half years and yet again there is a fundamental shift in how we work — complete with a whole new set of questions. In this new state of work, the age of working hybrid, we are trying to collectively figure out how to keep what is good from having the flexibility of choosing work time and place, but also addressing imminent questions such as new ways of collaboration and how to deal with an often deteriorating feel of belonging and connection. And redefine what “office” as a physical place will mean for us in the future at the side. Sounds like a complex set of questions? You are not alone in this.

The good news is that no one has figured out all this completely and there is a lot of room to make this custom to SAP as it needs to be. SAP’s Pledge to Flex is the commitment and the mission to supply a framework, guidebook, and set of rules to find a workable hybrid work model which is true to SAP’s DNA. The most valuable resource the company has are the ideas, the inventiveness, and the drive for innovation of its people. Every part of our hybrid work setup needs to cater to this and support what we can collectively create and achieve.

But this is way easier said than done. Bringing together individual work preferences, team needs, and business goals in one workable team setup feels like an enormous undertaking. And it is — if you try to just wing it. Teams partly must deal with contrarian work preferences of its members and often the first reflex is to roll back to the simpler times before Covid-19 with its standard office attendance. But the world and the people in it have developed and so has their approach to work. Falling back into old habits is the worst step to take. It is time to figure out what hybrid work means for, and especially with, your team.

The Flex Team Workshop, co-developed with SAP’s AppHaus, helps you with this task:

• It is designed as a team-centric conversation about what to keep and what to change coming out of a remote setup.
• It also brings the discussion about what a “good” hybrid team setup looks like on a more factual base. The team directly discusses in this self-facilitated workshop along with their regular activities, and clarifies which ones have a collaborative element to it and which ones will profit from being done again in an onsite office setup and which don’t.
• Teams leave the workshop with a clear idea on why to come together in an office setup and how their hybrid work week will look like. This approach opens room for compromise and reduces the ambiguousness of starting in a hybrid work setup.

And for me, the mix between being in the office when it’s useful because others of my team are there but also keeping the flexibility to do my work when and where I perform best, is a really good situation to be in. Only the coffee in the office stays a topic to be improved.

Want to learn more? Have a look here to see all the details to the Flex Team Workshop.