Right to Play guides employees to a flexible work environment

Shifting to a flexible work environment

For years now, hybrid workplaces have been rising in prominence as employers have come to understand that employees require a modernized work environment. Recent events have only accelerated this transition and caused organizations all over the world to reconsider the process by which they can introduce flexibility into their workplaces.

After more than 20 years of helping children in 15 countries spread across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Canada, Right to Play has experienced a wealth of success in its mission to protect, educate, and empower children to rise above adversity through the power of play. As that success has continued and the organization has defined a goal of reaching 100 million children by 2030, it has realized the possibilities unlocked by a more flexible, hybrid workforce and the empowerment of those who work within it.

“Our mission has always been to help children in difficult situations by creating safe and empowering environments so that they can learn and grow both in and out of the classroom,” explains a Right to Play spokesperson. “The work is immensely fulfilling, but it demands coordination across different cultures spread around the world. More and more, we’ve realized that our workplace needs to become more flexible and that our teams needed to be empowered to more effectively work in the modern environment we’re creating.”

Right to Play knew that doing so meant defining a cohesive strategy for communicating with and empowering employees that could be pursued and customized at a regional level while simultaneously developing comprehensive workplace guidelines that would ensure positivity and productivity at a global scale. In doing so, the organization would help its employees get more value when working both from the office and from home while ensuring that collaboration within a varied environment remained easy. Additionally, Right to Play needed to be able to act at speed as it adjusted to the rapid nature of changing government policies.

Identifying the needs of different employee groups

In order to clearly define a strategy to realize its vision of a hybrid workplace, Right to Play partnered with Capgemini Invent, thereby combining the organization’s future vision with technical and consulting expertise based on a lengthy history of similar projects. The project began with a workshop that brought together the project team and Right to Play executives in order to define the key values that would guide the Future of Work program. This helped create a shared understanding of the primary challenges and the existing ways of working that would undergo transformation.

“Once we had clarified the starting point and our vision for the Future of Work, we agreed to construct a set of personas based on a status quo analysis,” says a Right to Play spokesperson. “We collected data that gave us better insight into what our various teams would need based on a set of employees that we identified as effective representatives of our target groups. As a result, we had a good idea what kind of customization we’d need as we continued to develop a plan.”

Right to Play and Capgemini Invent identified a core group of representatives from a range of different roles and located across the globe who were then interviewed as the basis for a set of persona templates. A team consisting of members from both organizations managed the interviews in keeping with the collaborative spirit of the project. By the end of this process, not only had the partners gathered the first-hand information they needed to define essential profiles for the Future of Work, they had also created and re-validated persona interview guidelines that could be reused in the future.

“One of our big goals was to make sure that we could always do this sort of thing again, if need be,” explains a Right to Play spokesperson. “With a hybrid workplace, we knew that we wanted to be ready to continue evolving as technology allowed and employee expectations demanded. So, we made sure to put together templates and guidelines that would help replicate the process in the future.”

Empowering employees throughout change

With the needs of different employee groups defined, Right to Play and Capgemini Invent then set about defining Future of Work policy that would guide the organization’s staff on how and when to work from home or the office in the new environment. This clarified the purpose and scope of the adaption and provided the principles that would offer guidelines for flexible work and hybrid team collaboration. The guidelines offer details regarding the changes to the office and how to use the shared space, as well as how to foster effective collaboration and positive connections in a hybrid environment. With these guidelines, managers were taught how to coordinate their teams, communicate the new policy, and inform their members about the resulting changes.

As this was developed, the partners additionally created customized agreements that fit the working needs of each persona group.

“Through our persona interviews, we learned that the various groups within Right to Play were diverse enough that we couldn’t satisfy everyone with a single approach,” says a Right to Play spokesperson. “While standardization has been the focus for so many organizations, our circumstances demanded rules and guidelines that were tailored to our very distinct teams.”

The partners ensured transparency for employees as well as numerous opportunities for orientation with the new ways of working. In addition, Right to Play and Capgemini Invent established a Change Network made up of feedback channels and a multiplier network that could track the implementation of the Future of Work policy.

“In the end, we had a clear roadmap for creating the truly hybridized and flexible workplace that defined the Future to Work program,” explains a Right to Play spokesperson. “On top of that, we had the tools necessary to keep innovating and evolving our processes for collaboration and communication so that we can replicate the process as dictated by the needs of our workers and our overall mission. This is going to make it easier for teams all over the world to collaborate and contribute to helping kids get access to safe educational opportunities.”