When we think of individualised work vs. teamwork, it might be easy to instantly assume that the two are at odds with one another. After all, one is about tailored, specific, specialised work, while the other is about interaction, coordination and cooperation.

How can each person working in isolation on their assigned tasks result in a situation where the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts?

As the famous saying goes, there’s no ‘i’ in ‘team’. Well, here’s how it’s possible:

Are you a manager advertising a vacancy? Are you waxing lyrical about your organisation’s adaptability and putting its employees first with a fully individualised work style?

If you really mean that, you might be using the wrong terminology...

Part of the workstyle training offering is to provide coaching to support individuals over a given period (usually 6 months) as they live and breathe their workstyle and experience the impact of working in a workstyle way on themselves, their teams and business.

Coaching provides the confidential and safe space, without judgement, to be both encouraged and challenged to deepen your understanding of yourself, what personalised working means to you. This sets you up to manage your autonomy, team-working and ability to excel in a personalised way. Psychological safety is paramount and therefore these sessions are either provided as one-to-one or in pairs of coworkers.

In order to scale this offering, and being mindful that we are always trying to provide more workstyle work for more people, we are setting up a new training programme in order to develop Workstyle Accredited Coaches.

Systems exist throughout our society as ways of organising people and shaping our fundamental beliefs about certain topics. Such systems are the invisible foundations of the societies we live in, and are therefore incredibly difficult to see, and even harder to change. However, human breakthroughs throughout history have taught us that our futures depend on us to evolve as the world around us changes.

Has Flexible Working Got You Round The Twist? 

Flexible Working. It's always high-up on a job description alongside ‘competitive salary’; ‘take your birthday as a bonus holiday’; and ‘fully-stocked staff canteen’.

But what does it mean? And how flexible is it, really?

Meetings: the default forum to make progress in the modern workplace. They allow us to chat face-to-face or screen-to-screen (or face-to-screen), with our human colleagues; shoot the breeze about weekend plans; set agendas; allocate work; report on capacity and new opportunities and, most importantly, discuss the progress being made with the tasks we've been set to ensure deadlines are met, KPIs are hit, clients are happy, reputations are preserved and money is made.

But have we ever thought that meetings themselves are a barrier to that progress? Has your workplace considered whether asynchronous communication might work better? 

A groundbreaking new report, Can flexible working help disability inclusion? Overcoming barriers to Flex Plus working, is set to be discussed at the Houses of Parliament on March 25th, 2025. Published by the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health in partnership with King’s Business School, the report explores how ‘FlexPlus’ working practices - not dissimilar to our workstyle approach - can impact disability employment outcomes in the post-COVID era.

Alex and Lizzie, Co-Founders of The Workstyle Revolution, have been invited to attend an event at the Houses of Parliament on 25th March 2025 to mark the launch of the new report Can flexible working help disability inclusion? Overcoming barriers to Flex Plus working, authored by Catherine Hale, Kim Hoque, and Ben Baumberg Geiger.

This short article gives an overview of the relationship between independence and interdependence at work and highlights how worker independence improves individual performance and - perhaps surprisingly - actually fosters a more interconnected and effective team dynamic.

The pandemic reshaped our approach to work, and now is the time to cement lasting change. Join the Workstyle Pioneers initiative. Be part of a world-leading movement to make work more accessible, fulfilling, and productive for all.