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If your company adopts hybrid work, here’s what to focus on to get the most out of your team’s time—together, and apart. Instead, employees can work from home when they want and come into the office when they want. I hope you have found inspiration to formulate a hybrid office plan that serves you, your teams, and your business well over the next 12 months.
Is hybrid better than WFH?
You may find that the hybrid WFH model doesn't give you all the perks of working remotely, and that it limits you in some areas. On the other hand, working for a fully remote company provides more freedom, flexibility, and social opportunities. So in the end, the choice is totally up to you.
He and his family live some distance from his office, requiring him to commute an hour each day to and from work. He has a well-equipped home office, and his children are at school during the day—so, not surprisingly, Jorge feels he is most productive and focused when he can skip the commute and stay home alone to work. He prefers to go into the office only once or twice a week, to meet with his team. Notably, both Quora and Dropbox are keeping their office spaces but leveraging them as co-working spaces rather than as full-time offices. This is another aspect of their models that will contribute to their success and that smaller companies can emulate without the need for expensive office space rent. The company should plan meetings and events with remote workers in mind.
Happy? Want to learn how to be?
Employees prefer the flexibility of a hybrid work environment because it helps them fit work around their personal lives. Since employees don’t have to commute every day, they have more time and flexibility for personal and family commitments. And on the flip side, your team can still reap the benefits of in-person collaboration when they’re in the office. That’s the ultimate recipe for employee satisfaction—workers can lead rich personal lives and still feel connected and engaged at work. However, some companies have made moves to adapt their workspace to a hybrid workforce.
By eliminating some and making others asynchronous, they boosted productivity. The core of this model is that the company isn’t going fully remote-first like the first example. Instead, they choose to keep an office and require employees to spend some time in it. Some employees may even want to spend more than the required amount of time there. Regardless the workforce will be mostly local rather than distributed because employees have to come into the office occasionally.
Reduce costs
It also allows your people to choose where they sit in the office–whether that’s with their favorite coworkers, teams, or alone to get in the zone. Now that you know what hybrid work is, the different types of hybrid work schedules, and the benefits and disadvantages, it’s time to implement hybrid work into your organization. To adopt a hybrid work model, you need the right people, processes, and technology. As a manager, it’s important to trust that your team is doing their best, even if you can’t see them in person. Once you set guidelines for your hybrid work schedule, trust your team to follow them and avoid checking up on how and where they’re working. This hands-off approach can be hard, but it’s backed by data—people at high-trust companies report 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement than employees at low-trust companies. Suddenly, we reallocated time used for office lunch breaks, commuting and business travel to productive work.
Similarly, teamwork and relationships will be challenged in new ways. Hybrid work creates the opportunity to spend meaningful time together in the office collaborating and building hybrid work from home relationships. In contract with the previous options, remote work is the default in this hybrid work model. Employees work by default from home or from anywhere they want.
Key Questions:
They are best for communicating short, non-complex subject matter. There are a number of business messaging platforms, with the most popular being Salesforce’s https://remotemode.net/ Slack and Microsoft’s Teams. Both products offer basic messaging functionality, but each has its own specific differentiating features.
Oh knock it off already with the remote work bash fest! It’s here and most people who have the option to work from home, even in a hybrid model, enjoy not having to wake up at the butt crack of dawn to commute to an office where they are probably less productive
— Vannie au Julii-Rath (@vanniethefake) February 8, 2023
Workplace analytics can help you pinpoint the busiest times of the day and the most used facilities, so you can create a workplace ideally suited to your team’s needs. Over the last year, workers have become accustomed to the freedom and flexibility of working remotely. Even after vaccination makes it possible for businesses to start planning for a safe return to the workplace, most workers now expect the freedom to choose where and when they work. And that means the traditional nine to five is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Your business success depends on how well you support your people. How do you make sure your office ticks all the boxes to accomplish your business goals?
Hybrid working and the employee experience
However, the hybrid workplace is not a simple formula or a panacea for all workplace challenges. Today’s hybrid workplace must be implemented strategically, taking advantage of modern HR technologies that engender connection, collaboration, and employee engagement. In our data, we see evidence that hybrid workers can make adjustments to their own routines to maximize their long-term career satisfaction. That difference in expectation around career development could be the key driver pulling them into the office more than their colleagues who are more often at home. Throughout the pandemic, many workers have moved farther from the office, leaving them reluctant to face long commutes on a regular basis now that they are being called back in. Others may simply have acclimated to the work-from-home lifestyle, carving out office space in a spare bedroom or corner of the kitchen and finding more time to spend with their families at home. Without the right tools, no team will succeed regardless of its organizational structure.