Dr Matt Webster, Head of the School of Allied Health, Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine & Social Care at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) looks at how creating an entrepreneurial mindset within the workforce can help organisations shape their post-pandemic methods for working. Matt participated on the Entrepreneurial Heads Programme in 2019.
Our school mission statement includes the commitment to ‘empower our people to increase the quality of their outputs’ and asserts that we will take necessary risks to achieve this. By far the greatest impact on empowerment we have seen is through the provision of an entrepreneurial approach to leadership.
The post-pandemic environment has altered the expectations of the workforce and challenged the acceptability of the previous methods of organising work. In many forums, these discussions have been distilled into a battle between the need to be physically available (branded by detractors as ‘presenteeism’) versus working from a flexible location.
A common error in these debates is to conflate ‘Home working’, ‘flexible working’, and ‘agile’ working as synonyms. They can be viewed better as consecutive steps in the movement towards the full empowerment of a workforce and the comfort or trust a leadership team has in its own delegation and communication skills.
In 2018 the school I lead adopted a policy of authentic autonomy, the true delegation of the ‘how’ for each task.
This approach was prompted by a recognition of the differences between knowledge work and the traditional ‘widget’ making in factories of the previous 200 years. The type of work had changed, but our model for how we organise remained broadly the same. Previously, a workforce arrived at a factory and undertook a particular skill in a repetitive and coordinated manner until close. The measure of their combined efforts was the number of widgets produced. Our working day, colocation, and management style all remained centered on a model of workers working and managers watching them do it.
Knowledge work requires periods of deep concentration and focus. These productive periods, which are facilitated differently for each individual, are also interspersed with lighter periods better suited to admin work, collaboration, or networking. Both combine to provide the innovation and creativity that any organisation needs to thrive.
The knowledge work equivalent of factory widgets is difficult to measure at the scale of one day. Instead, it has less tangible measures such as the level of innovation, wellbeing, and creativity fostered. The success measure for any organisational model in knowledge work should be the number of productive periods it fosters.
To address the challenge we first accepted that the circumstances leading to a productive period were unique to each individual, could not be coordinated on the scale of an organisation, and that there was no value in ‘watching’ someone undertaking knowledge work.
Next, we provided colleagues with the freedom to organise and execute tasks in a manner, time, and location that best suited their individual needs to be productive. We also co-created the expectations around outcomes when making requests, ensuring both parties in a delegation were comfortable and clear on the agreement.
As a school we became outcome-focused. If an outcome was delivered below standard, our first reflection was introspective in ‘how well had we communicated the request?’. We got better over time at aligning the agreed outcomes with our wider strategic direction and better at being explicit about the important and less important parts of a task outcome.
In tandem with this approach, we implemented several processes to keep each other connected and to keep the direction we were moving at a school level aligned.
- Line managers committed to a 30 minute 1:1 meeting with each staff member each week. This developed the relationship required for trusting each other with this degree of autonomy. They also served as spaces to discuss development and performance feedback.
- Teams of individuals with shared responsibility committed to meeting weekly for 45 minutes. A standing agenda of individual updates, progress, and challenges were used in meetings chaired by the line manager. This served to disseminate innovation and build team relationships but critically linked individual task outcomes with the wider achievements of the school.
- Development sessions were held with line managers to support the use of outcome-orientated delegation and behavior-based feedback. Making use of reflective frameworks to shape our approach helped to become comfortable with the new methodolgy.
An entrepreneurial approach to leadership values innovation. By having the freedom to choose the path to the agreed outcome, colleagues found new ways of achieving outputs that either exceeded the expectation or were completed in less time. Reflections from academics and line managers showed that the organisation of work evolved into ‘expert (academic)’ and ‘client (line manager)’. This provided more freedom within the 1-1 sessions for a supportive and productive discussion on pastoral needs or development ambitions.
Performance feedback became more frequent and also became easier to implement, with positive feedback targeted to take place in weekly team meetings and developmental feedback given individually. Having clearly defined and previously agreed task outcomes led to staff members being more mindful of their performance levels against them, which again reduced tension when constructive feedback was required.
Colleagues responded positively to this approach. Our staff wellbeing, even during the pandemic, outperformed other areas of the institution as we were agile to respond to the uncertainly and accustomed to working in the disseminated manner enforced by COVID.
As organisations look to shape their post-pandemic methods for working, the balance between efficiency and resilience is likely to be reset on more even terms. By creating an entrepreneurial mindset in the workforce, along with the structures and processes to facilitate authentic autonomy, there is a version of work organisation that may very well fit that need.