Is Hybrid Work the Best Option for Your Team?

The common work schedule has looked the same for as long as most can remember. The accepted norm is you wake up five days a week and are expected to check in and out at a specific time at a central location. We all call it a 9-5 schedule. However, in recent years, companies are switching to alternative ways, and one gaining particular popularity is hybrid work.

With hybrid work, you find that a portion of employees are present in a central workplace, while the rest are working remotely. In most cases, employees alternate amongst themselves and know their days to join the central workplace.

Are you an employer wondering whether hybrid work is the best option for your team? Read through the following article to get the answers you may be looking for.

The Hybrid Work Factors To Consider

There’s a difference between hybrid work and remote work. Hybrid work consists of remote and full-time office workers, while remote work means you can work anywhere that is not regarded as the typical office space.

Now, as an employer, you might be wondering whether to incorporate hybrid work for your team. Here are some benefits of hybrid work:

1.   An Increase in Employee Satisfaction

A good work-life balance is a significant consideration for employees in this era. A new wave of increasingly mobile global workers seek to take advantage of technology to this end. This advancing technology and comfort are among the reasons to work from home for the current workforce.

Waking up and commuting to work is slowly becoming less of an accepted part of work. It is increasingly seen as an inhibitor of work-life balance. For every work environment to succeed, there must be a work-life balance. And hybrid work helps people get more hours back in their life by removing the daily commute — while still maintaining a level of in-person connection that some company leaders prefer.

At its core, a hybrid system enables employees to better program their life according to their work schedules, while not completely isolating employees from the central team. It’s a level of control and autonomy that naturally supports greater employee satisfaction.

2.   Encourages Joint Effort and Productivity

You may ask, does working from home increase productivity? Yes and no. That’s where hybrid work comes in. With this kind of system, workers can choose where and when they will do work. This supports everyone: employees work where they feel they are more productive, and employers can flexibly structure their teams.

With the increasing number of work-from-home apps and software, it is easier for a hybrid model to work. Employees from every department can communicate effectively. With this technology, in-person meetings that are a staple of office-based work are no longer necessary.

Productivity and project management software also supports hybrid work by enabling workers to collaborate easily. Now, multi-part projects can be effectively managed, regardless of employee location. This newfound flexibility naturally translates to increased productivity.

That said, lack of face-to-face interactions, like in remote work, can hinder work relationships. But, because of its dual nature, meeting with fellow employees is not limited to hybrid work. You can do hybrid work from home when face-to-face contact isn’t needed, and then work from the office when it’s critical.

3.   Boosts Mental Health and Wellbeing

An employee’s mental well-being is important. People are different and how they work is not the same. Some are productive in the comfort of their home office, while others work best when surrounded by team members. Remote work can build a feeling of loneliness among workers, while office work can create a sense of restrictiveness.

The hybrid model is here to combat all that. It encourages social interactions without the need to be physically present. Your workers can find what’s best for them and fit in with the rest of the team members.

When given the flexibility of choice, employees feel a sense of belonging in a way that the organization cares about their mental health. Such practices make employees enjoy working with you more. They’ll do everything to be productive since they know the company thinks about them too.

Companies that place a strong emphasis on employee engagement through flexible work conditions have healthier and happier employees. Ultimately, healthy employees create a healthy company, and a healthy company has a greater chance of succeeding.

How to Manage a Hybrid Work Model

For hybrid work to flow correctly, you need to have a proper way to manage your team members. The first and easiest way is to have employee monitoring software that you can use to effectively manage your distributed team. This software is especially important for generating a work-from-home log for the remote work segment of your hybrid workforce.

Also, this software can be used as a collaborative system among your employees. That’s because work from home software helps you establish a virtual community within a short period. The best work-from-home tools will also have office productivity software built-in for managing in-office workers.

Another way to manage is creating separate but equal benefits for employees. All employees need to feel appreciated, which will boost the company’s productivity. In other words, there can’t be one set of rules and rewards for in-office employees and another for remote employees.

Final Thoughts…

From employee satisfaction to increased productivity, hybrid work brings with it clear benefits — and should be a real consideration for most companies. The modern working world has quickly changed the way people view work. You don’t have to go to the office to get things done. But nor does it mean the end for offices. And that’s why hybrid workplaces show all signs of being the working model of the future.

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels