Work Forward – A better way of working
The Webinar Recap
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
On March 4th, Territory proudly co-hosted a webinar with Work Forward leaders Jim Kalbach and Mark Tippin from Mural and Jim Van Over from ServiceNow. Part of the public launch of the Work Forward movement, this webinar followed the first-ever Work Forward Summit on October 8, 2019, that brought together leaders from companies like EY, PayPal, WeWork, Trello, and more.
There were three main goals for the webinar: to recap the first Work Forward Summit, to discuss strategies for implementing Work Forward principles in your organization, and to explore how to kickstart conversations about working forward at your organization. If you weren’t able to attend the live webinar, make sure you check out the event’s recording.
We began by describing Work Forward as seeing the world of work as a shared, common, yet very complex subject that can be better. Work Forward recognizes the dynamic relationship between work activities and the Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How elements of working. And improving the business of work requires acknowledging that there is a unique context to work at a personal, team, and enterprise level. Work Forward strives to explore and experiment to help identify tools and practices that actually make work better. Our assumption is that providing a broader Work Forward ecosystem view will offer workers and companies the ability to see themselves in the picture and find a path for considering their Work Forward strategy.
Once we’d painted a picture of the ideas behind the Work Forward movement, we moved on to recap the Work Forward Summit. The Summit provided a great opportunity and setting for participants to explore the environment, people, equipment, systems, and culture needed to enable increased productivity, greater satisfaction, and better business outcomes. This exploration began with identifying why we work and what that work looks like in practice, and culminated by discussing methods for how our work might be transformed by applying ideas, approaches, and innovations that are available today. Further details, including a capture report from the Summit and activation tools, can be found at the Work Forward site.
Attendees then got to see Work Forward in action. The team from Territory and MURAL, led by Mark Tippin, Head of MURAL Services, showed off an engagement tool called the Challenge Wheel. This conversation-starter can be leveraged to spark discussion about the current state of work through the lens of work activities we all undertake every day.
The Challenge Wheel is available on the Work Forward site under “Tools for Working Forward.”
The webinar moved to an active Q&A session. Our panel of Work Forward leaders offered their thoughts on audience questions about introducing Work Forward to their companies. Our discussion began by digging into questions regarding company adoption of the Work Forward philosophy and how to work with objections to change. To ease concerns over change, the panel stressed the importance of communication and recommended leveraging activities that explore the case for adopting a Work Forward mindset with the goal of improving work, for an individual, team, or enterprise.
We then closed by discussing work in general, figuring out what gives meaning to our work and asking how we can work better with others—especially across different demographic groups. These questions led naturally to our takeaway question: what is the ultimate vision for how working forward will shape the nature of our work and the places we work?
We relished the opportunity to host our first online gathering of like-minded professionals exploring how we can best evolve the way we work today and into the future. We are in the early stages of a movement that is building a coalition of leaders from all walks of business and industry who can pollinate ideas for ways each organization to craft a bespoke way of working that is best for them. We’d love to have you join in the conversation and share your thoughts and ideas for building a better way of working with Work Forward! To get involved simply check out our “Get Involved” area of our website to see the myriad of ways to engage and get updates on future events and ongoing discussions in the Work Forward Movement.
