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Are you READY to embrace Hybrid Working?

Writer's picture: COLCOMCOLCOM


Are you ready to embrace Hybrid Working? If you answered yes, you are not alone. According to a study by McKinsey Survey, corporations expect employees to only be in the office between 21% and 80% of the time, or one to four days a week. This has shown that people from all over the world are ready to accept the post-pandemic future of Hybrid Working.


For instance, big corporations like Google have redesigned and restructured their offices and meeting rooms to facilitate the ease of hybrid working for their employees. With Google being one of the first corporations that have successfully implemented Hybrid Working which ranges from restructuring their offices’ space to changing their working policies, many corporations are taking a step-by-step approach in planning their Hybrid Workplace strategy to ensure that it will be a successful rollout. However, some are still unsure about the factors they should take into consideration when it comes to Hybrid Working. Here are three tips that you can consider when planning for the Hybrid Workplace:


1. Have honest conversations with employees about Hybrid Working

Having honest conversations with employees and inquiring about their desires and attitudes towards Hybrid Working is important to ensure that the company does not risk losing talents. A recent global study conducted by Fuze has found that two-thirds of employees surveyed in the UK, USA, and Australia would prefer changing to more flexible jobs. This meant that companies that fail to include adequate and flexible plans for their Hybrid Work model will result in employees leaving and working for other companies that are in line with their expectations and attitude towards hybrid working.


Companies can start to distribute surveys to the employees to gather their thoughts and expectations on Hybrid Workplaces. If most of the employees would like to come to the office only a few times a week, it’s time for the organization to rethink its office layout, invest in safe collaboration spaces and reduce the number of dedicated tasks.



2. Establish guidelines for team collaboration and flexibility

Planning a hybrid model for work will be difficult for organizations because employees are being welcomed to a new reality which is having to spend half of their time working remotely and other half of their time in the office. Employees might take time to adjust to the new mode of working as well as support from their organization. Thus, it is important to establish guidelines for team collaborations and flexibility.



Some of the guidelines can include the working hours, and the expectations of employees to set their presence status to online when they are at work. Other guidelines that companies can look at could be addressing the concern of video meeting fatigues. They can restructure the workday to prevent employees’ burnout when they are adjusting to the new reality of work. These guidelines provided will help to serve as a useful starting point for teams as they navigate through the new normal and figure out which tactics are most effective for them.



3. Equipping your Hybrid Workplace with Safe Technologies

As Hybrid Workplace model requires employees to spent half of their time in the office and the other half working remotely, companies need to start equipping their workspaces such as meetings rooms with safe technologies. This is to ensure that staff are provided with a safe and reassuring working environment, while not adversely impacting the ability to perform their duties in the office. For instance, companies can start looking at revamping their meeting rooms to Microsoft Teams rooms whereby it helps employees to have friction-free meetings, safely.


Microsoft Teams Rooms are purpose-built, native calling, and meeting solutions that deliver a complete Teams meeting experience with high-definition audio and video, on Teams certified 1st and 3rd party hardware. Teams Rooms go beyond what can be done with Teams on personal devices by providing unique in-room capabilities, like one-touch join, content cameras to share physical whiteboards and proximity features like seamlessly transferring the room into a Team meeting from your personal device. In addition, employees can receive meeting room capacity notifications easily when a room is at full capacity. This allows employees to practice social distancing in the office and enable them to communicate with their colleagues or clients who are working from home.



In conclusion, the idea of planning guidelines, work structures, and revamping the office spaces to have a successful Hybrid Workplace rollout can be a massive task that needs months to build. While these suggestions are meant to serve as a starting point for the Hybrid Workplace, we must keep in mind that there is no panacea for this whole process. Every company’s Hybrid Workplace approaches will be different from others and the management will have to make their own decisions about what is best for their company and employees. In the future, everyone must continue to learn, adapt and be flexible to changes.


Contact us at enquiry@colcom.in if you would like to know more about the Microsoft Hybrid Workplace Solutions.

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