ThemeGetting work done
CardCard 61 of 65
Questions5 to explore

Work Process

How we normally get things done

The way your team gets work done is invisible until someone is in a different location and realises they are outside it.

Work process is how the team actually operates day to day: how tasks start, how they move through stages, who checks in with whom, how reviews happen, and how finished work gets handed over or shipped. In an office, the process is partly embedded in the physical space: who sits next to whom, which room is used for reviews, who walks by at the right moment. In a hybrid team, none of that geography exists, so the process has to be made legible.

Making the work process explicit does not mean over-engineering it. It means the team has a shared understanding of how work flows, documented well enough that someone who joins, or someone who was away for two weeks, can find their footing without having to reconstruct everything by asking around. It is also the foundation for improving the process, because you cannot improve what nobody can see.

Make it explicitWrite down how your team's core work process actually works, from how a task starts to how it ends, including who is involved at each stage and where the work lives.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Map the actual process, not the ideal one

The most useful documentation describes how work actually flows today, not how it should in theory. Start with what the team does now, then improve from there.

Write it where the work lives

Process documentation works best when it lives close to the work itself: in the project tool, in the shared drive folder, in the team wiki. A document nobody can find is the same as no document.

Revisit after things go wrong

When a task falls through the cracks or something gets missed, the best teams ask: was the process unclear, or was it clear but not followed? The answer shapes whether you need to document better or agree more explicitly.

Onboard people into the process

New team members learn the work process mostly by watching and asking. A written process doc gives them a reference that does not depend on a person being available to answer the same questions repeatedly.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

If a new team member joined tomorrow, how would they learn how your team gets work done, and how long would that take?
Where does work most often stall or get confused in your current process, and is that a documentation problem or a clarity problem?
How does the process differ for remote versus in-office team members, and is that difference intentional?
When the process changes, how does the rest of the team find out?
What part of your current work process would be hardest to hand over to someone else, and why?

Watch for

Work processes that are never written down become tribal knowledge. They work fine until someone with that knowledge leaves or is unavailable.
In hybrid teams, the informal parts of the process (the side conversation, the quick check before sending) are only available to people in the office. Remote colleagues work from the formal process, which is often incomplete.
Teams that document the process once and never revisit it end up with documentation that describes how work used to happen, which is sometimes more confusing than no documentation at all.