Getting the Best Out of Hybrid Working
Hybrid working has been a bit of a revelation over the last couple of years thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. When many people were working at home for the first time, they found out that they actually liked it and that it suited their lifestyle.
The added freedom that working from home can provide was being discovered for the first time by a whole new group of people who had never been able to access it before. This has made it hard for many workplaces to revert to having everyone in the office as many employees are very reluctant to drop some element of remote working from their lives. The added flexibility is something that is not easily let go of again once the possibilities offered by it have been grasped.
Relatively small things like being able to go and run some errands during the working day without it being a problem have been an absolute revelation for a great many employees. There are now more discussions about how to optimise for the best performance from the hybrid forms of working that are fast becoming the new normal.
Optimising Hybrid Working for Your Office
One of the best ways to ensure that hybrid working is as successful as it can be is to let go a little and let your team fly. It is the opposite of the instinct of most managers but it is a healthy thing to do and will empower your team. They have their expectations for what a week’s work looks like and if they aren’t managing it successfully they will realise themselves that they aren’t coping and take their own steps to adjust how they manage their workload.
Allow your team to decide which days they are in the office and which they are at home and for the most part you will see that their performance in general will improve as they find their own routines and ways of working that fit how they are wired.
Allowing your team to have some leeway with their own working hours and schedules can help with employee retention, because it is a very nice perk that isn’t available everywhere. Being able to choose their own hours and locations will probably also cut down the number of sick days that are used dramatically.
Reduce Needless Meetings
Meetings are the bane of office life and many employees feel that their time is better spent outside of them. Only arrange for in-person meetings when they absolutely can’t be avoided or done in some other way and try to only invite the people who are absolutely necessary. It is also recommended to allow for a remote joining option if someone says they can’t attend in person.
Make it feel like an occasion, every time that the whole team is meeting in the office, give it a fun extra like cake and coffee to increase the feel-good factor that arises from being there. This will make employees more willing to attend meetings in the office in future and some may even begin to spend the rest of that day in the office to plan ahead beforehand and to debrief and reflect afterwards.
Create New Hybrid Working Policies
New working situations require new workplace policies to acknowledge the shifts that have happened and the new circumstances that are affecting the working environments of the staff.
It can be difficult to figure out how best to reconfigure things when so many people want to take control of their own working hours and having a good shared diary of who is due to be working which hours can really help to tie everything together.
Monitor the Situation and React Accordingly
Create reporting processes that look at the individual productiveness and measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that help to make sense of how each employee is doing. It is fairly easy to do this and it gives a good picture of how each employee is performing against a standard measurement.
It is important to remember that although the new way of working is flexible, it is still largely in an experimental phase and requires monitoring to ensure that all of the work that is required does end up being done to the correct standard and deadline.
If this is simply not happening, you may need to have words with your team in order to recalibrate some of their efforts so that any slack is indeed taken up quickly and each team member who is being allowed this level of flexibility understands that it is a privilege that the company can revoke if it is proven not to be working.
Nobody wants to be the person issuing the warnings and telling people what they don’t want to hear but sometimes this is necessary to ensure the continued good working of the office, whether actually in the office or not.
Get the Best Digital Tools
Don’t be afraid to spend a little money on the best business tools to help your staff to manage their projects. They will be working from outside the normal office environment so they will not necessarily have the benefit of most of the higher end software tools that are normally available to them.
Depending on the type of work that your organisation does, it may be helpful to sign up for something like monday.com which is a collaborative project management system so that many team members who are based in different locations can work together more easily. Together with video chat software via Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Skype, your team should be well-placed for collaboration from both inside and outside the office.
You shouldn’t expect your team to pay for the software that they would normally use in the course of their jobs so ensure that if they use Adobe Photoshop normally, it is still available to them when they are working remotely. It may be a case of changing how the company manages subscriptions to various software packages in order to ensure this all runs smoothly.
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