Since the massive shift to remote work in 2020, office attendance has still been 30% lower than in the pre-pandemic period. While the rates vary depending on the area, the economy type, and even the housing cost, the general trend is clear—employees have gotten used to working from home. Now, it's the employers who need to adapt to this new reality.
Although some business leaders promote an in-office work model, other employers seek to make the best of the two worlds. In 2021, around 63% of high-growth companies adopted hybrid work models to accommodate both on-premise and remote employees. In 2023, around 70% of employers embraced hybrid work and the flexibility it offers.
Creating and enabling a functional and productive hybrid workplace is the key to making such a model work. However, preparing for potential challenges is the key to securing stability and long-term efficiency. In this article, we'll enlist the most vital steps to establish a productive, future-proof hybrid workplace.
What is a hybrid workplace?
By now, the concept of hybrid work is familiar across many industries. However, the idea of a hybrid workplace is still in its infancy as businesses have polarized opinions on whether they should return to in-office work models or make their workflow more remote-friendly.
A hybrid workplace is an environment equipped with all the features and capabilities for both remote and in-office employees. The goal of a hybrid workplace is to preserve high productivity levels across the enterprise regardless of where employees choose to fulfill their duties by providing them with the tools and features they need.
Also, a hybrid workplace is a framework of policies and guidelines for business leaders, executives, managers, and teams on how to cooperate, communicate, and manage tasks considering all the specifics of working remotely.
Initially, the goal of a hybrid workplace was to accommodate the sudden leap to remote. For many businesses, it was not a planned step but a necessary measure. As a result, there was a need to optimize new routines and find a way to recover and maintain productive collaboration between employees regardless of their location. Back then, a hybrid workplace was supposed to tackle security, communication, and productivity monitoring.
Now, its role has evolved to provide employees with the exact level of flexibility they require for their office/remote balance, keeping a high level of productivity—which is a long-term effort.
The future of hybrid work: a fading trend or the next normal?
According to a report by Resume Builder, nearly 90% of companies plan to implement new policies for returning their employees to the office by the end of 2024. Major corporations like Twitter and Google are particularly insistent on bringing the in-office model back by introducing stricter mandates.
With CEOs urging workers to attend offices and discouraging remote, decision-makers can reasonably grow doubtful of investing in accommodating their enterprises for hybrid work.
After all, if employees will eventually stop working from home, what's the point?
Many businesses and companies approach hybrid workplace as a temporary measure, expecting to return to the flows and routines as they used to be before the switch. However, trying to go back to the previous state is the opposite of business growth. Businesses evolve and change—it's a natural process. The transition to remote was part of the change, and it has impacted enterprises. Not acknowledging this change and treating it like an obstacle or a bandaid means intentionally curbing business potential and cutting away opportunities.
For that reason, companies need to explore the long-term advantages, like the ability to hire the most outstanding talents from any city in the world, that can be achieved within a hybrid model framework before they make a final decision.
The role of a hybrid model goes beyond being a lockdown workaround. There are several reasons why it took root across enterprises—and each of these reasons is worth a detailed look:
Expanded talent market
Adopting hybrid workplace models opened the door to new talents and exclusive skill sets in several areas. After coming across the talent shortage in their region, companies used the capabilities offered by remote to search for international candidates with experience in their niche. Doing so allowed them to discover new, unique perspectives and diversify their talent pool, which led to a considerable increase in efficiency and value generation.
- Increased competitiveness
Companies that back away from hybrid work and don't dive into the opportunity of finding niche experts with relevant experience across the globe become more vulnerable to the competitive landscape. Compared to them, companies that have embraced hybrid workplaces gain leverage by reinforcing their workforce with unique professionals who already have experience with many processes and projects. - Global scaling
By utilizing the capabilities of a hybrid workplace, businesses can scale their services globally at a quicker pace and lower costs. A hybrid work model makes it possible to explore a multitude of business landscapes, identifying the areas with the optimal office rent cost/service demand ratio and making them the starting point for expansion.
Optimized employee efficiency
The common reason behind the push towards in-office working models is that "CEOs are in charge again," implying that employees, not C-Suite, mostly favored hybrid workplace models—and now C-level executives are weighing in. While it is true that CEOs prefer more predictable traditional model frameworks, employees lean towards hybrid approaches because of their positive effect on efficiency.
- Flexible time management
According to a McKinsey survey, 20% of employees prefer working from home to save commuting time. By having more control over their workplace and schedule, they can avoid losing working hours by proceeding to their tasks directly from their home. Such a benefit becomes particularly relevant in urban areas with dense city traffic. On average, remote workers save around 72 minutes a day, liberating more time for handling their responsibilities. - Stable productivity
Despite acknowledging a 10% drop in productivity among full remote workers, the latest research by SIEPR suggests against condemning hybrid work models. According to the authors, hybrid work environments have the same productivity levels as office-only ones without demonstrating any negative effects or decreases. Another research also reveals that employees pour around 40% of their commute time savings into work, progressing across their tasks faster.
Hybrid workplace strategy: 5 steps to securing long-term value
1) Enable a digital workplace
There are two false assumptions about hybrid workplace that need to be taken into account.
According to the first one, a hybrid workplace can be established by installing just one piece of hybrid workplace software. The second one states that using a wide range of tools from multiple vendors is all that it takes to build a remote-friendly workplace.
The reason why both of these concepts are incorrect lies in the need for synergy, which can’t be provided by just one tool or a number of third-party platforms. Hybrid-friendly businesses need an ecosystem that unites a number of tools, platforms, and technologies detrimental to the efficient performance of an enterprise department. In other words, instead of simply building a technological bridge between office and remote, they need a digital workplace.
A digital workplace (DW) is a secure and easily accessible platform that enables employees’ engagement and efficiency regardless of their attendance preferences by providing the tools and cross-department features for executing tasks and managing workflows.
A digital workplace became a response to the years-long employee needs for more accessible digital apps and tools—back in 2022, around 95% workers admitted experiencing difficulties with the existing office tools. Currently, the digital workplace market size is expected to reach $31218.6 million by 2027, which marks its ability to satisfy the demand for flexibility and tool versatility.
When it comes to creating a digital workplace, it’s not a matter of finding a template to build from. There is no template. A digital workplace is developed in accordance with the niche specifics and the needs of its target department.
As a result the choice of technology can become a challenge. Which is why it’s important to know the most common innovations used for building a digital workplace. They are usually the core and the infrastructure that then you can build from.
- Artificial intelligence
AI is a prevailing trend among technologies, augmenting employee performance capacities and streamlining processes across the enterprise — which makes it an important element of a digital workplace. The robust analytical potential and learning abilities of GenAI solutions make it possible to reconcile office and remote flows within a single digital workplace while cutting away at the redundant steps that prevent hybrid integration.
Employee organization
Generating schedules and reports, scheduling meetings, gathering employee feedback and well-being.
Employee learning
Overseeing onboarding courses and training, monitoring and evaluating employee progress, and providing feedback and suggestions.
Compliance assistance
Ensuring flawless regulatory compliance, monitoring for changes and updates, timely notifying about potential legal risks, and providing FAQ assistance.
Cross-enterprise communication
Analyzing and accumulating insights from virtual meetings to compile comprehensive digests and send them to participants, handling requests and queries, and updating employees on changes and events.
Security
Identifying suspicious behavior patterns, scanning emails for spear phishing campaigns, notifying security teams about potential threats, and preventing unauthorized access.
Data analysis and organization
Processing large volumes of data from several data sources following employee search queries, visualizing data at employee request, and running comparative scenarios.
- Cloud
Cloud technology became the foundational element of any digital workplace design, providing all the agility and accessibility needed to accommodate the needs of remote teams. With the help of the cloud, enterprises were able to unlock new scalability options, effectively allocating resources and optimizing expenses, as well as bringing multiple on-premise platforms and services to a single standard by migrating them to the vast cloud infrastructure.
Seamless integration
Integrating cloud solutions with platforms and tools used by the company as well as providing opportunities for new integrations in the future.
Agile collaboration
Flawlessly adjusting and scaling utilities to the growing number of experts and teams collaborating on the same tasks and processes.
Secure accessibility
Connecting experts to their relevant processes and data regardless of location provides virtual workspaces for extra safety.
Enhanced communication
Offering built-in communication platforms for faster internal department communication, task management and employee monitoring.
- Automation
Intelligent process automation plays a detrimental role in securing seamless task execution and reduction of time needed to complete tasks. The redundancy-cutting capability of the technology makes establishing a digital workplace possible as it allows replacing time-consuming manually managed routines with automated flows. As a result, employees gain the benefit of accelerated and streamlined task completion which allows them to stay productive and focused on value in the office and at their remote workplace.
Dynamic workflow enablement
Overtaking manually managed tasks such as data entry and data consolidation to enable employees work directly on the outcome and make more rewarding decisions.
Paperwork optimization
Automating document processing, intradepartment transitions, generating relevant reports.
Planning augmentation
Measuring business performance and providing by-department reporting, facilitating long-term planning.
Streamlined HR activities
Facilitating employee onboarding and hiring processes with automated formal steps, while letting HRs proceed to communication and more in-depth consulting.
- Department-specific apps
Managing a successful hybrid workplace requires consistent optimization and tapping into employee potential. Leveraging custom profile apps allows achieving this by equipping department employees with all-in-one apps that assist them in their everyday tasks while evaluating their performance, identifying opportunities for increasing efficiency, and augmenting them with department-relevant tools.
Hybrid performance assistance
Helping employees optimize their office/remote work, generating performance reports, scheduling their attendance, and providing suggestions and notifications.
Progress tracking
Assisting employees with task management and milestone tracking, helping employees collect relevant department information.
Cross-department collaboration
Facilitating interactions with other departments (generating tickets from support teams, sending requests to HR teams, gathering feedback from data analytics teams) by replacing multiple different collaboration tools with one feature.
Greater flexibility means more customization options. More customization options mean more hybrid workplace models and tools individual for every company, its practices, and the department it wants to transform.
Therefore, an unlimited number of profile apps for the digital workplace can be designed and created to cover specific department interactions or fit employee needs. That is why such apps often make up the majority of our digital workplace solutions development — a remote-friendly model allows for many ideas that can and should be given a digital framework.
2) Build with readiness to go fully remote
Although many business leaders hope they have adapted to unforeseen circumstances and believe they won’t have to send their employees to work from home again, uncertainty makes it impossible to calculate every outcome. Therefore, being prepared for a force majeure capable of disrupting office work is crucial to increasing enterprise resilience and securing its stability.
Accordingly, building an efficient remote model is the path to an efficient hybrid model. Since the advance of the hybrid workplace was brought about by the transition to working from home, letting enterprises build a secure, optimized, and accessible place must be the first priority of tech executives and teams.
How functional should the remote component be? Ideally, it should be prepared for the scenario where if all employees don't come to the office tomorrow, they'd still be able to perform all their activities uninterrupted from their home. That means that executives need to consider every flow and identify the approaches and technologies that convert it to digital.
3) Foster the hybrid workplace culture
Many of the flaws commonly associated with hybrid work are real, yet they're not inevitable. The efficiency of any work model depends on what practices and guidelines it's based upon, as well as the quality of compliance with these practices. So, if a workplace doesn't have a culture or operates on outdated principles, its productivity is expected to go down. For that reason, to make the most of their switch, executives and leaders need to develop, embed, and monitor proper hybrid workplace management rules and routines while avoiding the following pitfalls:
- Applying in-office practices to a hybrid work model
Some managers and executives make the mistake of treating hybrid workplaces as on-premise workplaces. As a result, they use practices that either no longer work or are no longer efficient, which ends in a frustrating experience for both them and their employees.
For example, managers often admit to having difficulties with tracking the productivity of remote employees, which complicates their task of identifying areas for improvement and making performance reviews. However, they struggle with evaluating performance because they lack new review mechanisms built with the remote in mind. Introducing new performance qualifiers and onboarding managers on hybrid workplace solutions for productivity monitoring can alleviate such issues and help them adapt to the new routine.
- Not establishing virtual meeting etiquette
Perceiving hybrid work as a passing trend led to businesses sometimes being lax on their communication guidelines. The latter results in less than satisfactory outcomes of virtual meetings where it's impossible to check in with every participant and ensure their full involvement at the meeting.
In practice, hybrid workplaces tackle such issues in several ways. For instance, they develop company virtual meeting etiquette, informing employees about what's required of them (keeping their cameras turned on, notifying them about their hard stops before the meeting begins).
Alternatively, some companies prefer to share the record of the meeting or its detailed summary with all the participants to keep them in the loop at all times. It's possible to use the combination of both approaches to motivate active participation during the meeting and secure long-term access to discussed points. The key point is that executives and managers should proactively foster a new workplace etiquette. If there is an issue or a lapse—it has to be addressed with all the tools and means a hybrid work model can provide.
- Not promoting the “in-office” component to employees
Despite around 25% of employees considering quitting their jobs if subjected to strict Return To Office policies, it doesn't mean that people don't want to work from the office ever again. It's the lack of flexibility and control over their schedule that concerns them.
Companies that don't look into their employees' needs and struggles don't exactly improve the situation. Even hybrid-friendly businesses can find themselves struggling to encourage office attendance days.
The truth is that employees are interested in attending the office. They want to connect with teams, stay in the loop, or participate in events that are important to their company. But such an interest has to be nurtured at all times and not by passively "punishing" employees working from home.
A hybrid workplace culture focuses on creating equally comfortable work environments for office, remote, and everything in between. For instance, to encourage employees to come and work from the office, an enterprise can equip them with means for tackling commuting issues, i.e., apps for real-time traffic tracking, route optimization, colleagues in the office today monitoring, workspace booking and leaving notifications on their progress. There can also be detailed event calendars and communication platforms to keep remote employees in the loop about office events.
In addition to being highly useful, such improvements also show employees that their presence in the office is welcome and important to the company.
4) Apply a forward-thinking approach to security
Cybersecurity remains the cornerstone of every business work model. Aside from revealing major benefits, going fully digital has made data more vulnerable to manipulation, forgery, and theft. Such a risk made CEOs reasonably anxious about adopting a hybrid workplace and letting employees work with important business data unsupervised.
However, security concerns should always be addressed, not avoided—and modern hybrid workplace technology comes with evolving safety measures in mind. The main priority for decision-makers and executives is to ensure multi-layer security, which means implementing cybersecurity tools and onboarding employees on the threats they may encounter and the importance of preventing them.
Technological
Incorporating secure remote access and website success, advanced firewalls, and private office VPN, protecting data via decentralized and immutable data storage, and reinforcing cloud-based platforms with robust security solutions.
Human
Providing employees with regularly updated guidelines on the latest phishing attack types, educating them on identifying threats (C-level phishing), running them through data leak scenarios, and data hygiene instructions.
Office
Securing a safe office environment with the help of office pass apps and identification systems, keeping office attendees' logs, preventing third-party devices' use, and ensuring employees update their software as required.
In the context of security, the biggest vulnerability of the hybrid model is the human factor. When employees switch between a secure office workplace and their working station at home, the lines become blurred, and they subconsciously assume their data is protected no matter where they go. They do their part as office attendants—but they can be obvious about their contribution to safety outside the office.
Leaders need to address this by communicating the differences and instructing employees on what they must do on their remote working days to maintain a secure and well-protected ecosystem. Being one step ahead of phishers and dangerous hacker groups means that technology must always go hand in hand with human vigilance.
5) Continuously work on improvement
The trick to building a productive and resilient hybrid workplace model is remembering that there is no final step. Continuously reaping the benefits is impossible without continuously offering improvements. The nature of hybrid work is dynamic—its evolution was accelerated as a response to a sudden disruption. Accordingly, the further development and enhancement of hybrid models depends on the adopters' ability to react and change.
No organization could afford to be static—future-proof productivity is defined by the willingness to search for budding flaws, remove redundancies, and keep building instead of hastily adapting to the aftershock.
Considering this, business leaders and executives should be prepared to:
- Regular performance analysis
All newly implemented models will have their flaws and lapses in productivity, which can be fixed by timely response. It's important to consistently compare KPIs across the departments, compare office and remote productivity, and dissect issues to find a solution. While a hybrid workplace is an ecosystem, it needs to be corrected and directed manually—and the results of proper intervention are worth the vigilance. - Change management
Hybrid workplace models are highly responsive to change. Whether it's an introduction of a new department, a new service launch, or a company policies update, managers and executives must always pay attention to how such change affects the hybrid environment and whether adjustments should be made. Keeping employees in the loop about the change is also vital to maintaining uninterrupted productivity—there should be no blindspots in the journey. - Experience exchange
Communicating and comparing notes can be an enlightening experience for businesses on their way to embracing hybrid workplace strategies. Knowing what other enterprises did, where they found themselves struggling, and what they found the most satisfying about their transition to hybrid provides a valuable perspective and can help leaders discover new approaches to try out or technologies to keep in mind. New business relationships focus on collaboration—providing insights and suggestions for fellow adopters is one of them.
What are the must-haves of future-proof hybrid workplace research and development?
It’s impossible to completely predict the future. There will always be unforeseen challenges and sudden disruptions. The goal of the enterprises is not to correctly identify every issue businesses will be dealing with for the next 10 years. Instead, their priority should be making sure that their hybrid workplace has the resilience and the means to shake off the shock of the unexpected and resume its operations uninterrupted.
Achieving such a result takes a proper mindset, a correct choice of tools, and the experience of developers with multiple hybrid workplace projects under the belt. If you're interested in exploring the latter, let’s chat.
At Trinetix, we have embraced the hybrid work concept in all its diversity and versatility, which allowed us to become pioneers in hybrid workplace technology, helping multiple Fortune 500 clients transcend to the next level of flexibility. By sharing your ideated workplace concept with our professional teams, you'll be able to visualize your perfect hybrid transformation and build a working model capable of delivering high-value results for years to come.
