Boost Productivity with Our Hybrid Work Model Guide

Introduction

Whether you’re someone who lives by a strict daily routine or someone who takes a more free-flowing approach to their day, your work schedule has a big impact on how you structure your days.

At Launch Kit, we’ve spent time thinking about how to build an optimal weekly work schedule. We aimed to create a routine that provided collaboration time and also uninterrupted work time. We’ve been able to pull this off by building a hybrid work model. It has had a profound impact on our business's culture and productivity, so I’d like to share with you what worked for us. My hope is that you can take the concepts outlined here and apply them to your own business.

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"We believe that the type of work you’re doing should determine the environment you work in."

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Types of Work:

• Collaborative work - A space that promotes creative conversation.
• Deep work - A space that promotes focus and concentration.

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By taking a look at the tasks we do throughout the week, we’ve been able to build a weekly work schedule that allows us to have time for both types of work. This is how we built a hybrid work model that’s had a tremendous positive effect on our workplace culture and productivity.

The purpose of this article is to explain why we built this model, the tools we used, and how you can implement something similar in your company.

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Weekly Overview

• Monday/Wednesday/Friday - In the office.
• Tuesday/Thursday - Location of choice.

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This part isn’t revolutionary, but it is the backbone of the following steps. We follow a general three days in-office, two days remote work schedule at Launch Kit.

I should note that while we say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are in the office, it is common that team members will meet up at the office, then go to a coffee shop or the chamber of commerce to collaborate on a project together. The key is that on those three days, we’re downtown, during business hours, and use the Launch Kit office as a central hub.

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Meetings

Alright, here’s where things begin to get a bit unique. We only take meetings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. By doing this, team members are guaranteed to have open calendars on Tuesday and Thursday to work on uninterrupted deep work. As a marketing agency, this includes work like logo design, web design, video editing, SEO research, and copywriting. These types of tasks are best done with headphones on and no interruptions so that you can enter a flow state.

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How to Regulate When Meetings Take Place

If you like the sound of this weekly schedule that I’ve outlined so far, now is the part where I show you exactly how we pull it off.

Key Tools Used:

• Google Calendar
• Calendly

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These two tools are critical for making this hybrid routine work.

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Google Calendar

First, you need to use a digital calendar like Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. This allows your team members to scan your calendar and will also allow the scheduling software (Calendly) to view your availability.

If you’re a paper/planner person, that’s cool, I get it, you can still use your paper, but it’s beneficial for you to at least have the digital calendar set up so that you can benefit from this productivity opportunity.

Make sure to put all events on the calendar; otherwise, this system will not work.

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Calendly

Now time for the secret sauce that makes this entire system work. We use a scheduling software to easily show someone our availability and let them pick a time that works well for them.

We use Calendly at Launch Kit, and it works great. Here’s how we use it:

1. Each team member has a seat/account.
2. Each team member connects their Google Calendar to Calendly.
3. Each team member sets their available hours window to be Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 9 am - 5 pm. This makes it so that even if you have no events on your schedule for a Tuesday or a Thursday, Calendly will not show any availability on those days. Note: each team member can fine-tune their own hours. For example, I like morning meetings better, so I set mine to be 8 am - 3 pm.
4. Each team member has a handful of Event Types such as “30-minute Google Meet Call” or “1-Hour In-Person Project Discussion.” You get to create these event types based on what’s relevant to your business. For example, you might have an “Initial Consultation” or “Tax Review.”
5. When someone asks to meet with you, you send them a link to the event type. The page will display a calendar, showing your availability. Calendly is getting your availability from Google Calendar and only showing the user times in which you have availability.
6. The user can simply select a time that works for them. They book an appointment by entering their information such as name, email, or phone number.
7. An event is created on both your calendars and filled in with the relevant information. If the event type was a video call such as Google Meet or Zoom, conferencing link/details will be automatically created and added to the calendar event.
8. There are quite a few more small details/features, but I’ll leave that to Calendly’s website to explain.

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FAQ:

• No, it doesn’t show someone what you’re doing during unavailable times.
• Yes, it live updates as soon as an event is placed on your calendar.
• Yes, you need to keep your calendar up to date with events in order for this to work.

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How Clients React to This

When I first had the idea to implement this system in my business, I was worried about what clients would think about us only taking meetings three days a week. I was honestly scared to send the scheduling link the first time.

Well, four years later, I’m happy to report that they love it. They admire that we’re setting aside ample time to do the work they are paying us to do. They can see that these blocks of focus time lead to higher quality work and faster delivery times due to a lack of interruptions.

Alex Hormozi just recently did a great YouTube video that talks about this concept of manager time vs maker time. I’ll link the video below.

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Conclusion

There you have it. That’s exactly how we implemented an intentionally hybrid work model that creates time for both collaborative work and deep work.

If you run your own business:

If this is you, good news, there’s nothing stopping you from rolling this out next week. Just get everyone on Google Calendar and Calendly, and you’re good to go.

If you report to leadership/boss:

In this case, put together a proposed plan for yourself and/or your team to test this out for one month. Write out exactly how you’re going to structure your availability and which tasks you’re going to do during which times. Then set up your own Calendly account (this will cost you around $10) and demo it to your boss so they can see how it works. Pick a few KPIs that you can track such as the number of meetings, the number of tasks finished, and the quality of work to keep track of during your trial month. Test it out and report back to leadership your findings. If it goes well, maybe you’ll be the one that gets to spearhead implementing this at your entire company.

I appreciate you taking the time to read through this week's article. I hope that you found it insightful and action-oriented. My intention with these articles is to provide real-world findings that can make a real difference in your work.