With 98% believing their future meetings will contain remote participants, video conferencing technology should be available in most spaces. If you plan to reduce your office footprint, you’ll need hot-desking and office navigation technology to ensure that everyone can stay productive and get started quickly in any space. 97% of the workforce have concerns about returning, including touching shared office devices, knowing when a room was last cleaned, and knowing if a room is over capacity for safe social distancing. While policies and technology can assist in making the environment safer, the concerns of the workforce will need to be addressed. Communicating these changes will be key to making employees feel comfortable. Organizations may have concerns about maintaining culture and community when they extend greater flexibility to the workforce.
The in-person absence of someone does not mean the person is not an equal part of the team. Make a business case for diversity and inclusion initiatives with this data. The world of work is changing, and a hybrid work environment puts you in a great position to adapt to those changes.
Office-Occasional Hybrid Work Schedule
As work has expanded beyond the walls of the office, keeping the culture intact requires a shift in the way we think about shared purpose. Colleagues need to work together and build connections, whether they are in a room together or virtual, and your collaboration solution needs to facilitate interactions that would occur if people were together in-person. While hybrid work gives you the flexibility to choose your schedule, it’s important to communicate your working hours with your team.
Organizations will need to decide their hybrid or work from home option at both a company and team level. Companies may ask that teams agree on their remote days with their managers hybrid work from home or have one ‘crossover’ day together as a team to foster collaboration. Having clear agreements in place before the return to work movement begins is key here for planning.
Remote-first hybrid split-week
Workers have enjoyed a high degree of bargaining power due to a hot labor market characterized by low unemployment and ample job openings. If the economy cools and their bargaining power dissipates, it’s unclear whether some employers would introduce stricter work-from-home policies, economists said. That arrangement has yielded a slight boost in average worker productivity, Bloom said. For one, the average person saves 70 minutes a day commuting; roughly 30 minutes of that time savings is spent working more, he said.
