Hybrid work environments have become common in today’s modern office, but many employees working in them tend to dislike them. In fact, it has been reported that up to 60% of employees feel disconnected from their colleagues, resulting in low levels of collaboration and productivity. Fortunately, if your organization wants to retain great talent while keeping your costs low, it’s important to keep these five tips in mind when designing hybrid workplace models. You must make sure you are not creating a horrible hybrid workplace.
Research shows that collaborative cultures are a key ingredient to success. Collaborative companies are more agile, innovative and experience better employee engagement. At its heart, collaboration means giving up power—it’s about embracing empowerment, transparency and mutual respect. To create productive work environments that encourage collaboration among teams and individuals
Whether it’s Google Hangouts, Skype, or Slack; every organization needs to be able to communicate with their remote employees. Empower your workers with all of these tools and add some of your own as well. Communication leads to collaboration which ultimately results in better work!
Technology has helped us be more productive, but it can also hurt our ability to collaborate. As work becomes increasingly collaborative, it’s important to create situations where employees can get together and hash out ideas and problems in person. Take a hard look at your organization’s technology policies and meet with your IT team to see if there are ways you can optimize technology to facilitate face-to-face meetings and collaboration.
When employees are spread across two or more locations, it’s essential to integrate them into a single team. A cloud-based collaboration and meeting platform like Mendix can help team members stay in sync by making it easy to meet virtually. If employees aren’t working in close proximity to one another, they’ll need access to critical information—such as presentations and documents—even when they’re on the road.
When transitioning to more of a hybrid model, managers and employees need to be wary of high expectations. If you have always done things one way, changing is going to come with some growing pains. Make sure you take into account how changes will affect your team before implementing them. This can help alleviate some of that stress and make collaboration easier. A great example of managing expectations would be communicating during onboarding about what to expect in terms of communication styles. This might include when you expect responses or if you’re available at certain times throughout the day for questions or concerns.
Check out what HBR says about the challenges of a hybrid workplace here.