The societal shift towards more flexibility and freedom within certain roles has led to both innovative ideas as well as challenges. Today, many businesses are now implementing work-from-home systems, completely getting rid of their office spaces and committing to a remote working structure within their business. Yet some businesses still require some form of physical space to do their work properly and instead have chosen to use a hybrid system instead. This allows workers the business to support both remote workers as well as those that are either required to come into the office or even just those that prefer to be there. If you’re running a hybrid business, here are five ways in which you can improve your workforce today.
Create A Workplace Schedule
If your system involves everyone coming into the office on different days and then working remotely at other times, you’ll want to ensure that this doesn’t become a free-for-all, as well as the risk that nobody shows up at all. If you allow everyone to have full control over the days they work at home and in the office, then you’re increasing your risk of chaos. Instead, create a full schedule, ensuring that everyone is in the office at the times that they need to be and that everyone has a fair choice as to where and when they work. Setting up a fair schedule can be difficult and should really be left to your skilled human resources team. It’s recommended that you deal with each individual separately too, as some may be entirely unable to work in the office at all, for example.
Be Wary Of Creating Inequality
There is one particular benefit to allowing remote working within your business, and that is the fact that you’ll be able to significantly expand your talent pool, allowing you to hire people from outside of a reasonable commuting distance, as long as their job can be completed entirely remotely. However, when you have some employees spending a majority of their time in the office compared to those that are working remotely, there’s a chance that this can lead to real or perceived inequalities. If certain employees in the office seem to be getting more opportunities than those that work remotely, this can begin to cause a rift between members of your team. You should endeavour to provide opportunities for everyone, no matter where they work.
Assign Mentors To New Employees
When hiring new employees, it’s common for them to find it overwhelming and confusing when they first start in their new role, no matter how skilled they are. This is particularly difficult for those working remotely, as reaching out for help can be much more difficult when you’re not physically around people. As well as finding it difficult to ask for help when working from home, it’s also difficult for new employees to feel able to fully integrate into your business when there are no opportunities for casual chats with others. A great way to combat this is to create a buddy or mentor system in which you pair older members of your team with new recruits so that they have a port of call for any issues they have, and it will help them to feel more connected to the rest of the company.
Invest In Technology
One of the best things that a business can do to improve the quality of their team is to constantly invest in new, useful technologies. Whether it’s software or hardware, helpful tech can help improve the speed at which your team completes their work and may even remove the need to do certain tasks entirely. Finding ways to improve efficiency is always an important endeavour, and that can be done using software such as The Cloud Contact Centre for Horizon by Gamma. This software allows your employees to improve their communications and interactions with customers significantly with the help of an easy-to-use interface. Software like this is especially good for hybrid businesses as it’s designed to work across multiple types of devices, from desktops to smartphones.
Rethink Your Office Layout
For your employees that are going to be working within your office space, you’ll want to make sure that you spend sufficient time contemplating a better layout for the place. This is also the perfect opportunity for you to renovate your office too. With fewer employees being in the workplace, you can reduce the number of desks and devices needed, providing a more welcoming and fresh atmosphere. You’ll likely need to implement a hot-desk system so that employees can work wherever they want to and simply need their log-in credentials to access their work.
Making use of cloud-based systems will also help in this, as they’ll be able to not only access their work from whichever PC they choose to use in the office, but they’ll also be able to access everything from home too. When renovating your office, keep your team’s physical and mental wellness in mind as much as possible. Provide spaces for meetings and rest and the option for standing desks to combat the sedentary lifestyle that offices often bring.