Activity-based working means moving from space to space depending on your tasks and goals rather than being based at a single desk every time you visit the office. For example, your working space might include informal collaborative spaces, pods for single workers and meeting rooms of various sizes for different styles of work. You
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Activity-Based Working
might move from louder creative zones to quieter, contemplative areas within your working day.
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Agile Working
Agile working tries to go beyond flexible working (see below). Agile working is not just about where and when working happens but how that work is done. To take a simple example, it’s not about accessing your email from home (or the train!) at a time that suits you. It’s about considering whether an email is the most productive
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Agile Working
way to achieve your goal in the first place. Agile work aims to find the best ways to achieve outcomes with as few physical, virtual or procedural barriers as possible.
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Collaborative Working
Collaborative working is all about working together. That might be two or more people from within the same organisation, but it could also be two or more organisations – collaboration scales! Collaborative working might occur in an office between face-to-face colleagues or online over a conference call or shared document.
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Collaborative Working
Collaboration can happen in real time or otherwise. Collaborative working aims to achieve more than what would have been possible in isolation, incorporating more skills, knowledge and opinions than can be held by one individual or group.
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Compressed Working
Compressed working means working your contracted hours over fewer days. Often, compressed working means doing 35-40 hours in four days instead of five: in many cases, the basis of the trending four-day week. Ten-hour days might mean a three-day weekend, but they’re not without cons. Common issues include managing
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Compressed Working
childcare over longer days and, for managers, ensuring consistent cover over a full week (unless the whole company works compressed hours).
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Flexible Working
Flexible working may come with a small or a big F. Increasingly, flexible working for an employee means that within reason, you can vary your start and finish times, as well as your location, as best fits into the rest of your life. Some workplaces manage this informally; others require a Flexible Working Request (with a big F!). This procedure
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Flexible Working
allows an individual to ask for a change to their existing hours (on a statutory or non-statutory basis). Flexible working could be said to encompass everything else on this page. Flexi-time is perhaps a halfway house, with flexible start and finish times but core hours in between.
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Home Working
Home working, work from home, or even ‘WFH’, means what you think it does: doing your job from the place where you live. Like many of the other working styles noted in this post, home working may not mean being at home 100% of the time. Many of us work at home for a proportion of our contracted hours and spend the rest
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Home Working
elsewhere. Not everyone can do their job from home, but where they can, it’s usually with the help of technology.
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Hybrid Working
We wrote a whole blog post about hybrid working when Google still thought searches for hybrid meant cars. Hybrid means mixing two different things, and when it comes to working, it means a mix of remote and office working. The term hybrid working gained popularity rapidly at the beginning of 2020 as lockdown hit, and it’s not going anywhere.
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Hybrid Working
Although hybrid working is more about location, flexible working is often used interchangeably.
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Location-Agnostic Working
Location-agnostic working means that your physical location is not a barrier. In fact, your location should not factor into the equation at all; the site you’re working from is irrelevant to your ability to work. You could work from home, the office, a co-working space or a cafe on any given day. But it doesn’t end there. You could be
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Location-Agnostic Working
based in a different country to your company base without obligation to visit HQ or even be actively travelling the world in an RV.
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Mobile Working
Mobile means being able to move freely and easily, so (taken literally) mobile working means working freely and easily. Mobile working has come to mean working on the move as you go from place to place, logging in as and when necessary from multiple locations. If you take mobile working as ‘working from your
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Mobile Working
mobile device’, the meaning remains the same; mobile phones are called mobiles precisely because you can use them without being tied to a physical location.
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Remote Working
Remote working can be defined as being away, or distant, from the office, but as a traditional shared office becomes less important, what are you really remote from? In different circumstances, remote work might be home, mobile, flexible, location-agnostic – or all of the above. At FCC Innovation, we wonder if the phrase remote working
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Remote Working
will fall out of favour because it sounds a bit cold and uncommunicative – in 2022-3, remote working doesn’t have to feel isolated at all.