Ways of Working

Ask employees in different teams how work gets done and you will often hear very different answers. One team plans in two-week sprints, another in quarterly projects. One makes decisions in meetings, another in written documents. One uses a shared tool to track work, another relies on email and spreadsheets. These differences in ways of working shape how fast teams move, how well they collaborate and how easily leaders can see what is happening. When ways of working are clear and consistent where it matters, coordination is easier. When they are not, much of people's time goes into translating between teams.

The phrase ways of working has become common in transformation programs, particularly those involving agile, digital and hybrid work. It covers the practical, day-to-day layer of the operating model: how teams plan and prioritize, how they run meetings, how they make and record decisions, which tools they use, how they communicate and how they balance in-person and remote work. Changing ways of working is often where operating model changes succeed or fail, because it is where people feel the change most directly. For executives, transformation leaders, HR, team leads and managers, ways of working are where strategy becomes daily behavior.

Definition of Ways of Working

Ways of working are the practices, routines, tools, roles and behavioral norms that govern how work is done within and between teams, including how work is planned and prioritized, how teams collaborate and communicate, how decisions are made and recorded and how progress is reviewed and improved.

They form the team-level layer of the operating model, are shaped by approaches such as agile at scale and change during workforce transformation.

Elements of Ways of Working

Planning and prioritization. How teams decide what to work on, how often they plan and how they handle changing priorities.

Collaboration and communication. How teams share information, run meetings and work across functions and locations.

Decision-making. Who decides what, how decisions are documented and how disagreements are resolved. Clear decision rights prevent the same issue from being debated repeatedly in different forums.

Tools and information. The systems teams use to track work, share documents and access data.

Norms and behaviors. Expectations about responsiveness, feedback, accountability and how people treat one another.

Common Ways-of-Working Models

Agile. Short iterations, cross-functional teams, frequent feedback and continuous improvement, often using frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban.

Traditional project-based. Work organized into projects with detailed upfront planning, phases and formal approvals.

Hybrid work. Combinations of in-office and remote work, with agreements about when and how teams meet in person.

Asynchronous-first. Practices that favor written communication and documented decisions over meetings, common in distributed organizations.

Importance of Ways of Working in Enterprise Operations

They determine speed. Clear planning, decision and collaboration practices reduce delays and rework. Much of the delay in large organizations comes from waiting for information, approvals or other teams rather than from the work itself.

They enable coordination. Shared practices where teams depend on each other make it easier to align plans and roll up progress. Teams that plan on the same cadence can spot dependencies and conflicts before they cause delays.

They also shape culture and engagement. How people work every day affects how they feel about their jobs and whether they stay.

Ways of Working and Financial Management

Inefficient practices, such as excessive meetings or duplicated reporting, consume capacity that could go to valuable work. Even modest reductions in meeting time across a large workforce can free significant capacity.

Consistent planning and tracking practices make it easier to connect team effort to budgets, initiatives and outcomes.

Investments in tools and training for new ways of working should be weighed against expected gains in speed and quality.

Hybrid work arrangements affect facilities costs and should be considered alongside productivity and collaboration needs.

Common Challenges

New practices are announced without training or support, and teams revert to old habits. A one-day workshop rarely changes behavior that has built up over years.

Organizations impose a single model everywhere, even where different work requires different approaches. Agile practices suit product development well but may fit poorly with regulated processes or long-cycle engineering work.

Leaders expect teams to change while keeping their own planning, reporting and approval practices the same. Teams then work in two systems at once, the new practices for their own work and the old ones for leadership.

Too many tools and practices coexist, making it hard to see work across teams. Leaders resort to manual status reports because no single view shows what is happening.