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Hybrid working: planning for the future
Hybrid working: planning for the future

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Hybrid working: Planning for the future

Introduction

Planning for the future is key for any organisation to thrive, be successful and have positive outcomes for your stakeholders and customers, or students if you are a higher education institution.

Organisations are constantly evolving and there is a continual planning cycle of updating strategic documents, unit business plans and responding to operational needs. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic which required rapid reactive planning, there was a need for organisations to focus on futures planning and develop their workforce’s understanding and skills.

The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] and the role of the Future Generations Commissioner is ensuring that public bodies are ‘Acting today for a better tomorrow and aiming to make ‘long-lasting, positive change to current and future generations’ (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, n.d.a).

This course takes a human-centred approach to planning, draws on the Future Generations Commissioner’s resources and introduces you to ‘recognised’ approaches. These methodologies will help you understand the needs of your organisation to evolve their ways of working, particularly in hybrid working and digital transformation. It is part of the Supporting hybrid working and digital transformation collection and is designed to give you the opportunity to review the environment and context that you, your team, and organisation are operating in.

While futures planning often is focused on innovation, this course will encourage you to reflect on whether your organisation’s approach is fit-for-purpose as you explore different methods for planning with foresight, sense-making of situations, continuous improvement of ways of working, and managing change. You will develop a strategy to use a single framework model or a mix of models whilst considering elements of business strategies, workplace values and culture, wellbeing and sustainability as well as the digital skills and capabilities you require to meet your objectives.

The course does not focus on understanding and developing an organisational strategy. Instead, it focuses on how you can help to achieve a strategy’s desired outcomes by concentrating on planning, connected to operational and functional needs.