Co-creating Shared Commitment to the Next Normal of Work at Kansas University CPPR

Summary

A series of facilitated workshops with employees of Kansas University CPPR designed to form a shared understanding and commitment to embracing a “Next Normal of Work” where, regardless of type, level or location of work, employees were set up to thrive. The engagement resulted in a set of shared principles for the “Next Normal of Work”, foundational to onboarding new employees and building esprit de corps in what became an increasingly hybrid workplace.

Scope of Work Summary

Foresight
Assessment
Facilitation
Values & Principles Development

Client Background

The Center for Public Partnerships and Research (CPPR) at the University of Kansas tackles complex social issues by building and partnering with dedicated public agency professionals, non-profit service providers, and family members living and working in communities. Its multidisciplinary team comprises researchers, evaluators, innovators, problem solvers, builders, and implementers using proven research techniques along with cutting-edge data science to identify pathways and solutions to address the needs of children and families.

Problem

In 2021, Jackie Counts, Director of CPPR, approached Jigsaw Foresight to help the center navigate the move to remote and hybrid working necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns. The center’s growing team of around 80 employees were accustomed to working face-to-face and needed to adapt to the disruption to their normal ways of working and connecting, and the shift to various new platforms and technologies. Simultaneously, leaders needed to onboard new employees and translate a successful work culture from in-person to online.

Insight

The CPPR consists of a diverse group of social scientists, researchers and practitioners, accustomed to navigating social and societal change within the systems it seeks to support. Fittingly, the team needed to negotiate shared understanding and commitment to navigating its own organisational changes, not only embracing the potential in remote and hybrid working during the “Now Normal” of the pandemic, but setting themselves up for success in a “Next Normal” of hybrid work, where individuals and teams are augmented and connected by new communications and productivity technologies.

Solution

The goal was to develop a code of practice to aid the transition to hybrid and remote working that would unlock the potential in a distributed workforce across the US and multiple time zones. For this to be successful, it was essential that it was co-created through input and collective exploration by all employees.

To do so, Jigsaw Foresight created a participatory, foresight-driven process to gather people and bind them in common purpose, identifying: the evolution of work in the past; current anxieties about how “work works”; their desired Next Normal; and, how CPPR’s workplace values, principles and behaviours would need to shift to manifest this shared future. This was a space for honest employee-led conversations that surfaced a set of principles, values and behaviours for the future of work at CPPR. These were codified in a Shared Principles document that is co-owned and lived out by the organisation to this day.

Our work with the CPPR spanned several years as the initial project expanded into other pieces of remote and in-person collaboration. The initial Hybrid Working Practices took place over several months, consisting of two remote workshops, asynchronous co-creation and reflection, and the delivery of the final principles for integration within the CPPR workplace.

Methodology

Over the course of two workshops the Jigsaw team guided 80 participants through:

A Shared History exercise in which they mapped the significant changes and key moments that shaped the working world over the last half-century. In doing so, we enabled the team to see that while the change to hybrid working seemed fraught and perhaps insurmountable in the present, in a wider professional context it was no more challenging than many changes that had come before.

We then set the team to work in smaller groups on a Three Horizons process, asking them to clarify their current modes of working before then outlining the elements of a shared work future that they hoped to occupy.

Having identified the main changes, new ideas and values present in their working futures, we used Futures Wheels to explore cascading impacts of different changes, both desirable and undesirable.

Finally, we returned to the present and near future, to identify the stepping stones needed to manifest, inhabit and work in that future together.

The outputs of these activities and conversations coalesced into a set of hybrid working values and behaviours, structured as shared principles, that have enabled the center to expand and embrace hybrid working without losing the sense of grace and respect that the team so valued when it worked exclusively in-person. Even now, the shared principles are a core onboarding document for new hires.

Key Outcomes

The CPPR now numbers 100 employees from all over the US working remotely, in-person, and in hybrid teams with a clear sense of workplace culture. Embracing these new ways of working has enabled the center to thrive through a period of uncertainty and instability, ensuring the future scalability and diversity of their workforce. They note that not only have the values bound people together in consistent ways in remote, hybrid and #wfa working, they have unexpectedly widened access to a rich talent pool, out of state as well as in.

On the back of this work, Jigsaw also delivered an appendix to shared principles, a guide to vital meetings, which has enabled a new meeting culture where only essential check-ins take place, and given colleagues the chance to set shared conditions for effective collaboration; a vital way of working in such a geographically scattered team.

Client Testimonial

“The process helped us navigate a very uncertain and scary time. The conversations connected staff and allowed us to explore our assumptions and values around work and who we wanted to be as a center. The process and resulting shared principles were instrumental in shaping our decision to remain hybrid and establishing conditions for us to be successful.” — Jackie Counts, Director, CPPR

Methods glossary

Shared History
Three Horizons
Futures Wheel
Exapting in Horizon Two
Stepping Stones
Commitments