3 Crucial Questions About Hybrid Work

Updated October 6, 2023
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We can bet you already know what benefits hybrid work can bring to your teams. Most employees in favor of remote work enjoy more time they get to spend with their loved ones, without the stress of commuting and traffic jams, keeping more money in their pockets.

On the other hand, many employees may miss the in-person time spent with their colleagues, feeling isolated and lonely most of the time. Furthermore, many can also feel invisible while working from home, fearing that their achievements aren’t as visible as before.

For all these reasons, managers need to find a happy middle, take the best of both worlds, and offer hybrid work models that combine remote work with working from the office.

But if you’re unfamiliar with this increasingly popular work arrangement and have many questions about it, don’t worry. We have prepared answers to 3 questions that will help you better understand hybrid work and make it work for you and your teams.

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What is the Best Approach to Hybrid Work?

If you want to get the best out of hybrid work, try to make a combination that will align with your employees’ wishes and your core business goals.

You can start by asking your employees crucial questions that will determine their need for a hybrid work model and offer you insight into the ways they want to work in the future.

You should try and find out whether your employees would leave your company if the hybrid work option wasn’t on the table. This is a crucial step in preventing surprisingly high turnover rates. Then ask them about the ideal proportion of the remote and office-based days, as well as what work may require work from the office compared to tasks that can be completed remotely.

When you gather this invaluable insight, analyze all the responses, and create a well-devised Hybrid Work Policy, containing clear and relevant answers and guidelines. Use this policy to define the situations and processes when you would require your employees’ presence in the office, like onboarding of new team members, cross-team collaboration, or working on innovative concepts and solutions.

Of course guidelines in your Hybrid Work policy aren’t written in stone. This said you can adjust these rules over time to better fit your employees and your business needs. Use the trial period to work out which combination of remote and office-based days best fits the different needs of your various teams.

How to Ensure Inclusivity in a Hybrid Workplace?

The issue of inclusivity can be challenging when trying to create a hybrid workplace. This is why you need to make sure all of your employees have the opportunity to work remotely when it suits them best. You can achieve this in two ways, by pooling or rotating or by providing remote training opportunities.

Pooling and rotating require specific teams and employees to switch on specific jobs during a workweek. Imagine that you have a team of five IT experts working in a Control Room, you can let two of them work remotely 1 or two days a week while the rest of the team covers for them. They can rotate each week until every team member gets an equal number of remote days. You can also make some room for your employees to work from home by digitizing numerous business processes.

If you still have employees whose responsibilities tie them to the office, you can offer remote learning and training opportunities. Ensuring that every employee has the opportunity to develop their skills remotely and grow professionally adds to the sense of inclusivity in your company.

How to Help Employees Adapt to Hybrid Work Environment?

Even though the hybrid work option is high on their wish list when it comes to enhanced working conditions, many employees need time and help to adjust to this work model. If you want to ensure that your transition to hybrid work goes smoothly, you need to devise detailed plans, explaining every step you intend to take in the process.

First, you need to define shared goals that you want your employees to achieve.

Then, define clear individual roles and responsibilities to avoid confusion and potential projects and tasks overlapping that can affect your teams’ performance and success.

You also need to offer let your employees know what resources they can use to be productive and collaborate effectively in the hybrid work environment.

Besides ensuring tight cross-team collaboration, you also need to find a way to track hybrid workers’ performance helping them to stay highly productive. Here is where reliable monitoring software for employees can be of great help, showing you how your employees spend their work hours minute by minute. You can analyze this data to identify and eliminate specific roadblocks to productivity, helping your remote and office-based teams to manage their time and workload better.

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