This year took every employee and employer by shock. While some were able to work from home, remotely; some companies faced huge losses. Earlier there was resistance, no proper infrastructure, employees facing anxiety issues, zero work life balance and what not. But now, nine months later, we all have learnt to live in this new normal.
At the start we might have enjoyed remote working, now we certainly don’t. Facts have it-
77% of Indian respondents find WFH less enjoyable than as much as they did at the start. Infact 49% of them have started to miss the office social life.
Source: Barco
But conglomerates like Google, Microsoft, TCS and more are planning to expand the remote work model or implement hybrid work model till summer of 2021. Following the footsteps, other companies might as well want to extend or continue to follow hybrid work models.
So, what exactly can be the best practices to ensure hybrid work model success? To answer this and more, in this blog, we cover-
- Decide and segregate your employees
- Relook at your mental model
- Consider transiting to a flexi workspace
- Explore new technologies
- Recraft your culture
Let’s begin!
Decide and segregate your employees
Employees from every part of the world covet flexibility and freedom. Having worked remotely for so long, they now want to choose when they come to office and for how long.
A study reveals that employees would want to come to office 3 days and work two days remotely in a week.
So, to set a hybrid work model, you must segregate the employees into 3 basis the nature of their job- Office, hybrid and remote. The remote employees option is highly likely to increase your chances to deploy a larger talent pool.
Relook at your mental model
After segregating your employees in the mentioned three categories, you must start working at your own mental model first.
The main focus should not be micromanaging but trusting your people and ensuring they have all the resources they need to balance office and home work.
Moreover, training the managers to support all the 3 employee groups in an optimal manner and manage them must not be overlooked. Deploying an attendance management software that lets them mark attendance without any hassle is necessary too.
Consider transiting to a flexi workspace
Owing to our new reality, companies have started understanding how important re-evaluating office space is. To create the ideal flexi work setup, companies need to work on creating the same experience through the technology they use to connect with the hybrid employees and create a flexi work space that is warm and personal. This will help in managing the chaos that could sprout from increased flexibility and independence.
Explore new technologies
As the vaccine is still far from reaching the common man, companies know that the future of work is quite uncertain and so, investing in technology is the best way to stay better prepared.
In a survey, 600 decision makers revealed that 56% companies have increased their technology budgets, and speeding up digitisation efforts is also on the list for 34% of them.
Invest in technology keeping in mind how well it can support the hybrid or remote workforce.
Recraft your culture
Keeping all the three employee groups together performing their best cannot be achieved solely with the use of technology. Tailoring the culture is equally important. For the same, you must redefine your expectations by focusing on the result and task and not the ‘how’ of it. Rethink your KPIs that used to consider availability of employees as now they will mark their attendance using attendance management software from the comfort of their home and they get to decide how they manage the work they have been assigned.
Besides, you can work on strengthening the employee- manager and peer to peer bond so that it is okay to have frequent skip level conversations.
We are saying…
In short, a hybrid work model needs a strong culture, better technology, flexi-office space and keeping every employee in the organisation in tune with it to make it a success and become one of the best companies that follow a hybrid work model. You must look for new technologies that can support flexi work environments and different workforce types, especially HR software in India.