This document summarizes a presentation by Jon Ingham on remote work and distributed organizations. Ingham has over 20 years of experience in strategic HR. He discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to remote work. Ingham also discusses how work is changing to require more specialized knowledge and describes different models for organizing work, including functions, teams, communities, networks, and a blended network model. He provides examples of how these groups have formed in crisis response.

1. HR LEADer Online Summit
HR LEADer
Online Summit
Jon Ingham
Remote Work and Distributed Organisations

2. HR LEADer Online Summit
Jon Ingham
@JonIngham
• 20+ years in strategic HR, including as International HR Director
• Independent consultant, trainer, speaker, blogger, author…
• ‘The Social Organization’ (June 2017)
• With Dave Ulrich: ‘Building Better HR Departments’ (2016)
• A strategic perspective to all areas of people management and
organisation effectiveness
• Including use of physical and digital workplaces as an aspect of
organisation

3. HR LEADer Online Summit
Remote Work and Distributed Organisations
@JonIngham
“This is not how I envisioned the
distributed work revolution taking
hold. Millions of people will get the
chance to experience days without
long commutes, or harsh
inflexibility… This might be a
chance for a great reset in terms of
how we work.”
- Matt Mullenweg, CEO Automattic
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/covid-19-could-cause-permanent-shift-towards-home-working

4. HR LEADer Online Summit
Grouping Specialists for Increasingly Complex Work
@JonIngham
Supply
Increasingly specialist to stay
current given increased
knowledge available and rate
of its development
Ideally ‘T’ shaped
professionals with multiple
specialisms and breadth of
focus plus great soft skills
Demand
• Complex, cross-disciplinary
needs requiring specialists
to work together in groups
and networks
• Relationship workers vs just
knowledge workers
• Social leadership = leading
groups and networks vs just
individuals

5. HR LEADer Online Summit
Centralised, Decentralised and Distributed Organisation
@JonIngham

6. HR LEADer Online Summit
Communities Networks
Functions
Project
Teams
Centralised, Decentralised and Distributed Organisation
@JonIngham
Task focus,
Extrinsic motivation
Human focus,
Intrinsic motivation
Internal orientation External orientation

7. HR LEADer Online Summit
Functions and Divisions
@JonIngham
Groupings of people co-ordinating their work with others at same
level working for the same manager
Working in series rather than parallel – Peter Drucker: “they play on
the team, they do not play as a team”
Leading functions = leading individuals (groupings not real teams,
eg they do not need daily team meetings!)
Main requirements are trust and psychological safety

8. HR LEADer Online Summit
Horizontal Teams
@JonIngham
Cross-disciplinary collaboration to deliver outputs
Includes process, project, agile and product management teams
Increasing projectisation in many areas of work
Leading teams = focusing on the team outputs
Ensuring individuals are motivated to help the team
Balancing team and individual focus
Note increasing use of self managed teams

9. HR LEADer Online Summit
Crisis Management Teams
@JonIngham
• Create teams that will tackle current
strategic priorities and key challenges
facing the organization.
• These empowered teams get to make the
calls within the authority delegated to them
and do not need permission from others.
• This will work only if they each have a
“commander’s intent”—a clear goal that
allows them to make decisions within a set
of parameters.

10. HR LEADer Online Summit
Communities
@JonIngham
Small groups with passion for a domain
Cultivation of relationships across members who may decide to
work together
Opportunity for ‘communities of performance’
Leading communities = focusing on the people and the community,
facilitating connection
Henry Mintzberg ‘Communityship’: being personally engaged in
order to engage others, so that anyone and everyone can exercise
initiative.

11. HR LEADer Online Summit
Volunteer Communities
@JonIngham
Steps to community
participation in the COVID-19
response:
• Invest in coproduction
• Work with community groups
• Commit to diversity
• Be responsive and
transparent
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31054-0/fulltext
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/13/a-million-volunteer-to-help-nhs-and-others-during-covid-19-lockdown

12. HR LEADer Online Summit
Distributed Networks
@JonIngham
Individuals linked by a common technological / cultural platform
who may decide to co-operate together around a particular domain
Great for sharing information - harder, but not impossible, to
produce outputs
Leading networks = encouraging curiosity and desire to co-operate
(eg by working out loud)
Brokering connections between network members and with other
networks

13. HR LEADer Online Summit
Innovation Networks
@JonIngham
“A truly collaborative, international effort,
with the best and brightest engineering and
manufacturing brains coming together to
rally all their resources in response to the
distress signal from the NHS.”
“Others pursued the start-from-scratch
approach and some of those projects have
been turned off.”
- Dick Elsy, CEO of the HVM Catapult
https://www.ventilatorchallengeuk.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/21/we-made-right-choice-in-ventilator-race-says-uk-consortium-head

14. HR LEADer Online Summit
Digital Workplace Supporting Organisational Groups
@JonIngham

15. HR LEADer Online Summit
Teams and Yammer Adoption During Pandemic
@JonIngham
Swoop Analytics
https://www.cmswire.com/collaboration-productivity/measuring-our-way-back-to-a-new-normal

16. HR LEADer Online Summit
HR Across Groups and Networks
@JonIngham
Communities
Networks
Projects

17. HR LEADer Online Summit
Eg Melded Network HR Model
@JonIngham
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/melded-network-hr-model-magazine-different-slant-jon-ingham

18. HR LEADer Online Summit
For More Information
@JonIngham
About me: joningham.com
“Strategic HCM”: strategic-hcm.com / strategic-hcm.blogspot.com
“The Social Organisation”: organization.social /
koganpage.com/SocialOrganization
Social media: linkedin.com/in/joningham, twitter.com/joningham
Email: jon@joningham.com, phone: +44 7904 185134