For the past 20 years, through my company Super Navigators, I have worked with organizations in 17 countries with the common factor that everyone has had leaders at the helm of the organization with great confidence in their employees as well as a great desire to attract, retain and stimulate the best people. They have believed that the means to achieve that is to set employees free of the constraints of both time and place. 

Back in 2005 – in connection with my PhD thesis “Work and Family Life – Get A Balance” – I developed a method that I have used ever since: I call it “collective reflection space for the development of individual life strategies”. In all its simplicity, it is difficult to change without the acceptance of the collective. I believe it is crucial that the company creates a common social acceptance of, and respect for, each other’s differences. It is my experience that culture is more important than either structure or personnel policies. It is not the company’s structure, but the company’s culture that determines whether the employees dare to use the flexibility. There may be some nice words about the workplace on the website or in the annual report, but it is the culture that sets the framework for the employees’ room for maneuver in relation to the choice of working hours and working places. It is the unspoken, yet often unconscious conventions, that lie like a carpet spread all over the company and form the basis for the employees’ movements and feet in everyday life.

The key to making the hybrid model work in practice lies in the work culture. The management must create a culture based on trust, security and belonging, at the same time as the employees must have a new language and tools to handle the individual flexibility. Super Navigators delivers the total solution in terms of creating a flexible work culture + giving employees / managers tools to navigate a flexible life. The Life Navigation concept can be linked to the company’s unique cultural DNA and in close collaboration with the company’s management, Super Navigators ensures a flexible work culture.

“For me, Life Navigation is quality of life; systematic quality of life in the workplace and at home. My philosophy in management has always been based on trust, autonomy, flexibility and responsibility, and therefore I have tried to look at what research shows about what works in management, and suddenly I see that this is called Life Navigation. When I use the word quality of life, it means that if your quality of life is high, you feel better as a person, your productivity improves, and you have more job satisfaction and a higher level of commitment. It’s a kind of kinder egg. You get several things at once: you learn to orchestrate your personal life and work life in a better way, and thus you gain more control over your life. After implementing Life Navigation, I have seen an increase in productivity. As soon as I started working systematically with Life Navigation, I could see that we were doubling the number of events with the same capacity. You can count the number of events. We have also seen a much higher degree of innovation and creativity. We solve more problems than before, and we have been able to implement new ideas faster.”

Those words are from Magne Skram Hegerbergs; who has for decades been a leader in several types of companies, both private and public. He is a good picture of how a leader “walks the talk” and creates change in employees by being the best version of himself.

You can read more about the Life Navigation concept at www.supernavigators.com