Purpose Over Place: How to Succeed With a Hybrid Workplace Model
The days of employees being stuck in their cubicles are quickly disappearing as the focus of work moves from place to purpose. Today, there’s less emphasis on work taking place in traditional locations, and more open-mindedness about where employees can work most effectively and happily. Organizations everywhere are facilitating all kinds of collaboration and productivity that unifies their business premises and, increasingly, other locations. This is known as a “hybrid workplace” approach. This blog will explore how to achieve success with a hybrid workplace model by:
- Enabling mobility and remote working/collaboration
- Adopting hybrid working spaces
- Securing your digital workspace
- Empowering employees
- Boosting employee engagement
Enabling Mobility
Enterprise mobility is a growing trend for companies of all sizes. More and more of us are working remotely and on flexible schedules. There are many benefits, including a better work-life balance for employees and reduced overheads for businesses. However, organizations must first ensure they’re set up so that day-to-day processes are not negatively affected.
This all depends on the quality of your collaboration tools. Leading solutions like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams provide businesses with the ability to not only enable a hybrid workplace model but to create an infrastructure that helps the business thrive.
Developing Hybrid Working Spaces
Flexible meeting spaces are key to a successful hybrid workplace model. During a fully remote meeting, everyone is on the same playing field. But with a combination of natural in-person collaboration, and online participants separated by video and/or audio, it’s easy for barriers to develop. When putting together your hybrid working model, you must consider your meeting spaces and how well they are set up to accommodate everyone. You can learn more about our advice on hybrid working spaces here.
Securing Your Digital Workspace
Of course, with the higher volume of employee movement, mobile device usage, and dynamic workplace locations, your IT team must change its mindset when it comes to workplace security. It’s important to implement a level of security that will keep your data protected but won’t reduce the benefits of your cloud computing infrastructure and thus defeat the purpose of this new flexibility.
Take care to use strong passwords, and multifactor authentication as the default setting, as this will help create a “security-first” culture and mentality among your employees. Even more importantly, choosing the right security tools will help keep your data and employees safe—no matter where they are or what device they’re using to access their information. Azure and Microsoft 365 can provide your IT team with the right tools to control access to corporate data, detect threats, and provide privacy by design.
Empowering Employees
One of the primary reasons to design and build a cutting-edge hybrid workplace model is to empower your employees to take control of their working lives. With the right setup, you can help them work smarter rather than longer and harder, and also improve your business’s bottom line, while maintaining a comfortable work-life balance. By putting in place the right solutions, you can make it easier for your disparate workforce to communicate and collaborate as if they were in the same room. By making it easier for them to get their work done, you boost not only productivity but employee engagement, which is important for lots of reasons.
Consider providing a tool like Microsoft MyAnalytics and encouraging employees to use it. This will help them gain insight and better control of their working lives and wellbeing. The MyAnalytics app provides personal productivity insights as you work, including AI-powered suggestions direct to your Outlook inbox to help you set aside time to focus on the work that’s most important to you.
Boosting Employee Engagement
Maintaining or bosting employee engagement should be very high on any organization’s list of priorities, and it will be even more pressing in a post-pandemic landscape. It’s also a crucial component to a successful hybrid workplace strategy. Your employees are more engaged when they’re properly supported, can feel the effectiveness of your leadership, and are confident that the work they are doing is related to the goals of the company.
Using the right platform for consistent collaboration, such as quick calls, daily updates and consistent and accurate processes, can help you support employees. This can be especially valuable for those who have only recently joined, are more junior, or are struggling while working remotely. Microsoft Teams, in combination with Microsoft 365, can provide the sophisticated communication capabilities that you need to stay in touch with your employees and help make sure they stay motivated.
For more of our thoughts and tips on improving your employee engagement levels, check out the webinar we just hosted about the employee experience. Alongside that, you can also read our recent blog post about the business benefits of Microsoft Viva.
Creating Tomorrow’s Success Today
Ways of working and the nature of the workplace have changed dramatically in recent history, with a wide range of new possibilities for employees and organizations. And as we move into the future, we’ll only see more new ways of working and possibilities for technology to make our days more efficient. A flexible organization that works to succeed with their hybrid workplace model today is also creating the foundation for success tomorrow.
Want to discuss a hybrid workplace model and hybrid workplace strategy that your organization can really get behind? Get in touch with the team at Worksighted.
Worksighted Team
We are a team of over-enthusiastic people, ready to help our clients utilize technology to spur growth! We love technology and come to work every day eager to solve problems and find ways to impact our clients.
