The COVID-19 pandemic pushed enterprises to adopt different work from home policies to keep their business operational. Yet after a prolonged remote working routine, organizations are now facing new challenges to reopen their offices. Most of it is due to the mixed emotions of employees returning to the office. It brings rise to the concept of a hybrid workplace – an approach that combines remote work policies with the usual office work culture.
In a hybrid workplace, employees have the flexibility to choose from working remotely or from the office in line with their job requirements and preferences. Many big enterprises have already started planning the best model for their hybrid workforce and determining how it would benefit their business and the employees. In fact, a strategic approach is crucial when adopting a hybrid work culture as reports from Boston Business Journals highlight that employees would rather turn down their raise (up to $30,000) in favor of working remotely.
Read more: Shifting to a Digital Workplace? Here’s What You Need To Know!
Enterprises Need to Embrace the Change
Companies need to realize that employee expectations have drastically changed over the past 18 months of working remotely. If they look ahead to attract and retain employees moving forward, they need to carefully draft their hybrid work model to fit the needs of their employees as well as the business. It requires redesigning the work policies, culture, and offices for the hybrid workforce.
A recent survey from the shared workspaces provider, WeWork, says “75% of employees would give up at least one workplace perk for the freedom to choose their work environment.” Also, around 50% of employees would “prefer to spend three days a week or fewer in the office, and when they do go in, they want to be there 5 hours a day or less.”
According to Quendrida Whitmore, SVP and head of community at WeWork, “The pandemic spurred a seismic shift in how we think about work. Employees prefer the flexibility to work where they want — at least a few days a week — and most companies of all sizes embrace hybrid work models.” However, adopting the hybrid workplace culture goes way beyond just providing flexible work options to the employees. It involves a tactical approach to ensure optimal employee engagement and overall productivity.
Read more: What is Hybrid Cloud Identity and Why It Matters for Your Business
5 Tips to Ensure Hybrid Workplace Success
To restart, companies need to think about using technology to facilitate employee management and drive expected operational efficiency. The hybrid workplace is expected to stay, so you need to ensure that your organization is ready to adopt it right and navigate the challenges effectively. Here are five tips that will get your hybrid work environment going.
1. Create Proper Channels for Communication
One of the most common challenges in remote work is to ensure good communication lines for employees. A hybrid workplace will not be devoid of this problem either, so you need to make sure that you have well-defined channels for communication between different departments as well as remote and on-premise employees. A robust team management suite like InfinCE can be a godsend in this scenario.
InfinCE ensures that your employees can easily interact with the relevant people with multiple options for one-on-one and group communication. What’s more, InfinCE also makes it much simpler for your employees to access the required information and business data to perform their jobs more effectively.
2. Set the Company Expectations and Goals Upfront
When managing a hybrid workforce, you need to ensure that your teams are on the same page and moving forward as expected. In a flexible work environment, it can be challenging to make sure that everyone on the team knows the metrics and team goals they need to achieve. This can, in turn, affect the overall productivity of the company and lead to an exhausted workforce.
InfinCE provides a unified dashboard to announce company news and pass the information to all the teams in real-time to resolve such challenges. It ensures to keep your remote and in-office teams aligned with the company goals and timelines to deliver their best performance.
Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security
3. Collect Feedback to Make the System Better
Managers and supervisors give regular feedback to their teams to ensure they address specific pain points and improve their performance. Similarly, collect feedback from employees on the hybrid work culture. It is important to ask how your employees feel about the hybrid work environment to improve the system and tweak the processes as required.
An all-in-one team collaboration platform like InfinCE helps everyone in the team stay on the same page with constant communication, feedback, performance transparency, and goal tracking abilities.
4. Provide the Required Training to Your Employees
You will need to reimagine what skills your employees need to ensure optimal output in a hybrid workplace. The success of your hybrid workplace approach will heavily rely on how familiar your employees are with using digital technologies for work management. It can range from the ability to make decisions to collaborating virtually within different departments.
You have to reassess the skills of your team and create training programs to address the gaps effectively. InfinCE facilitates collaborative and democratic training and development through easy access to top LMS platforms. Allowing seamless integration, InfinCE lets take advantage of effective tools that help drive a skillful workforce and productive workplace.
Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?
5. Integrate the Hybrid Work Culture into Recruiting
A major advantage of having a hybrid workplace is that you get the flexibility to hire candidates from anywhere across the world. The flip side of it also implies that employees can consider job offers from anywhere and join companies that best fit their needs. However, it creates a challenge when recruiting in-demand skills. Hence, you need to define employee engagement and support thoughtfully to attract new employees.
It goes true for retaining current employees as well. If you fail to integrate the brand value in your hybrid workplace culture, employees may start to look out for other opportunities. InfinCE helps integrate top CRM systems to help ease the onboarding process as well as keep staff motivated and engaged.
Do Not Rush It
You need to accept whether you are ready for a hybrid workplace or not. It is essential to have open interactions with your employees to determine whether they are willing to return to the office or prefer remote work. Likewise, you also need to evaluate the workforce capacity and rank your decisions on that. If only a few employees want to return to the office, it would be wiser to rethink reopening and draft the right working plan to suit your business needs.
InfinCE is a promising digital workplace collaboration platform that can easily bridge the gap between work from home and work from the office. InfinCE can easily transform your IT infrastructure into a digital friendy ecosystem at minimal budgets, establishing a convenient hybrid workplace model. To know more about how to get started with InfinCE, reach out to our experts or sign up here.
