The shape of work to come
Hybrid, flexible and AI-enabled working.
Around four hours on the shape of work to come: what the evidence says about hybrid, flexible and shorter working weeks, focused collaboration, and leading teams through AI adoption.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Agile and New Ways of Working
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Managers, HR and organisational development leads in councils, the NHS, housing, police, fire and charities redesigning how and where work happens.
Overview
This Focus brings together the evidence and practice behind new ways of working. It begins with hybrid and remote work, separating trials from opinion and drawing on Nick Bloom's Trip.com study. It then sets out flexible working law, from the right to request to the day-one right and the Employment Rights Act 2025, and examines the four-day week through the UK pilot, Iceland and South Cambridgeshire District Council. It turns to protecting focused time with Newport and Lencioni, then to AI and the jagged frontier, and closes with cases from HealthCare.gov to a district council, Bromford and Hafod.
Aims
This Focus aims to develop leaders who read the evidence on hybrid, flexible and shorter working weeks with care, design working arrangements that start from the work and stay fair to frontline roles, protect focused time, and lead their teams through AI adoption with judgement rather than hype.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Evaluate claims about hybrid, flexible and shorter working weeks against the strength of the evidence behind them.
- Design working arrangements for your team that are fair to frontline and rota-based roles.
- Lead a measured approach to AI in your service that protects learning, data and error reporting.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Plan a hybrid arrangement for your team that starts from the work, uses a team working agreement and anchor days, and builds in parity and fairness for frontline roles.
- Set out the current right to request flexible working, how it has developed, and the eight statutory business reasons an employer may give for refusal.
- Plan a fair trial of shorter working time that redesigns the work and measures service outcomes, workforce, wellbeing and cost against a baseline.
- Plan a team communication charter that records decisions in writing, sets response times and protects time for focus.
- Decide, task by task, whether work should be automated, augmented or kept human, drawing on the principles of the UK government's AI Playbook.
- Apply the five layers of agile leadership and the four instructions to diagnose the work, design the system, trust the people and keep learning in your own service.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Where and how we workHybrid, remote and flexible working evidence and lawBitesize2 modules
- 02Time well spentThe four-day week, meetings and asynchronous workBitesize2 modules
- 03Work, rewiredAI and the future of work, with case studiesBitesize2 modules
Keep going.
Part of the Agile and New Ways of Working topic, also sold whole as Lighter, faster, more human.
Go deeper, and pay only the difference
- You are hereFocus, 4 hours, £69
- Next stepExplore, Reworking work, 5 hours 30 minutes, £129. Already own the Focus? You pay £60.
- The whole topicImmerse, Lighter, faster, more human, 11 hours 30 minutes, £249. Already own the Focus? You pay £180.
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Prices per person. Read the full terms