Ways of Working – Catalytic Mechanisms to Drive Performance (and more)
What are catalytic mechanisms, and how do they drive sustained organisational performance?
At Humankind, we've designed our Ways of Working (WoW) as catalytic mechanisms—self-sustaining, performance-enhancing rhythms and rituals. These powerful tools align our team around strategic objectives, maintain attention on results, enable collaboration and learning across our team, activate our culture, and facilitate enduring organisational change.
Our EX for Performance Model
Ways of Working is one of the four areas in our EX for Organisational Performance model, an interconnected framework:
Rituals and Rhythms as Catalysts
'Ways of Working' can encompass:
- Rituals and rhythms
- Meetings and communications
- Team structures and agreements
- Guidelines E.g. flexible working
- Policies, practices, and tools E.g. Agile
Today, we’re spotlighting the key rhythms and rituals we use as catalytic mechanisms across the whole team at Humankind:
Weekly Rhythms: (15-20 mins, short and sharp) – Busy on the Dance Floor
Team Huddles:
Currently these include:
- Monday 25 min huddle: Delivery Excellence
- Wednesday 15 min huddle: Relationship Excellence
- Thursday 15 min huddle: Strategy Excellence, currently AI Every Day
We also rotate in key celebrations such as examples of our purpose and values in action. The focus of our huddles evolve with our business focuses.
Bi-weekly Manager 1:1s: Supporting Performance, Growth, Wellbeing, Priorities and/or workload blockers.
Monthly Rhythms: (1.25 hours to half a day) – Taking a Bird's Eye View from the Balcony
Unite Day: Monthly Business Update meeting, team lunch and time for in-person collaborative client work.
Monthly Business Update: Reflecting on performance, Strategy Update, Client Delivery Showcase, Ask Us Anything session with the Leadership team.
Acceleration Academy: Monthly professional development enhancing skills useful inside and outside of Humankind. Topics are a mix of business focuses and ideas from the team.
Annual Rhythms: Lifting into Space
Inspire Day: Really stretchy innovation, teamwork, strategic deep-dives, and external perspectives (including having clients in for couch conversations).
Holiday Party: All about the team and building relationships, not about the business. Half day of recognition and having fun followed by time to put our party pants on!
Using Ways of Working for Enduring Change: Humankind’s AI Integration
Mid last year, we knew we needed more widespread AI adoption—not ad hoc across the team, but a deliberate and fully embedded approach. We used our WoW rhythms to embed this into our culture and our daily work:
Inspire Day: Kick-started curiosity and enrolment through expert-led, interactive sessions. We showcased relevant use-cases, tabled fears and objections, and highlighted possibilities together.
Monthly Business Updates: Regularly showcased AI project updates, including an Agent we built and updates from our Co-Pilot pilot, solidifying practical understanding.
Acceleration Academy: Hosted ongoing expert sessions, building competence, confidence, and actionable use cases the team identified themselves. Subsequently, Louise, our EX and Ops Manager, hosted sessions launching our guidelines and showing the team how to build their own Pilots in CoPilot.
Thursday Strategy Huddles: Weekly touchpoints for experimenting, sharing use-cases, and embedding habits.
We also launched our AI Strategy on a Page and Using AI guidelines.
This structured WoW approach catalysed swift adoption and ongoing engagement, turning initial excitement into sustained, and consistent practices that are delivering results for our clients and Humankind.
Practical Steps for Your Business
How to start designing your WoW, catalytic mechanisms, for sustained performance:
- Clearly define your organisation's key priorities and strategic focus.
- Identify rhythms (daily, weekly, monthly, annual) that will support these priorities.
- Regularly review and refine your Ways of Working to align with your focuses.
- Involve your team in this. Ask for feedback and iterate.
- Keep the “Main Thing” in your company the main thing.
- Rhythms are a deliberate way of fostering connection but use your work to do the work of building connection (they don’t need to be separate activities).
Ways of Working aren’t just activities—they’re catalytic mechanisms to drive performance, enhance your team’s experience at work, and create change that endures. I’m thinking about ours at Humankind all the time so if you’d like to swap notes, I’m always only a phone call away.
