Recommendations and practical tips for successful hybrid work
Hybrid work is more difficult to organize than pure office or remote work, because collaboration brings both technical and organizational difficulties. The following tips and recommendations will help you avoid the most common mistakes and create optimal conditions for hybrid collaboration.
1. Communicate clear guidelines for hybrid work
Communicate openly and transparently to your employees what you expect them to do. Is remote work allowed? If so, how many days per week? Do certain core working hours need to be adhered to? When are you available? When should your employees be reachable and through which channels?
Only if you clarify fundamental questions right at the start will virtual collaboration function smoothly in the long term. You should also give your employees the opportunity to ask questions and contribute ideas. This not only benefits cohesion within the company, but often also productivity.
2 Create the necessary technical conditions
After more than two years of pandemic, many companies have now adapted to Home Office and Co. Microsoft Teams, Zoom or similar video conferencing tools have taken hold. Both employees and supervisors have found ways to work together virtually.
However, hybrid working brings with it some additional requirements. Teams are now no longer exchanging ideas with each other completely remotely; instead, some employees sit in the office while others work in the home office. Your office and conference rooms must be prepared to spontaneously connect participants online. Instead of headsets, conference speakers are needed for hybrid work. To ensure that all participants can see and understand each other, additional projectors, video cameras or sound insulation may need to be purchased.
3. Ensure fully digital processes in the cloud.
Hybrid work can only succeed if your employees can complete all important work processes equally well in the home office as in the office. They shouldn’t have to rely on file folders or files stored locally on an office computer.
For virtual collaboration to succeed, two key requirements must be met:
- Data and documents are accessible online to everyone who needs to work with them.
- Work processes can be handled completely digitally and online.
The first point requires an online file repository that your employees can access. A shared drive on the company intranet, for example, is suitable for this. Better, however, is cloud software that links data and processes. No one is helped if your accounting staff can download an invoice template, but entering the items and approving the invoice requires countless mails or chat messages.
Appropriate enterprise software like projectfacts combines cloud file storage with digital workflows. It allows not only to access files and documents online, but also to work with them collaboratively
4. Enable your team to organize themselves
The more flexible the collaboration, the greater the need for coordination. Who is in the office when? Where can I work tomorrow? While small teams can still coordinate via chat, especially medium and large teams are dependent on an online tool.
The projectfacts enterprise software combines all important business processes with a tool for workplace planning. It fulfills two essential application purposes, so that your team can organize itself independently:
- Information: your employees can find out online where their colleagues are working at any time. Who is in the office? Who is in the home office? When will colleague Ms. Doe be back? The combination with vacation and sickness management is ideal. This gives not only you as a supervisor, but also your employees an up-to-date and complete picture.
- Planning: Another significant benefit is work planning for the future. Employees can specify in advance when they want to work in the office and when in the home office. Desks or office space can also be reserved in advance. This is particularly suitable for companies that no longer make fixed space allocations, but instead rely on the desk-sharing principle.
It is also important that regulations can be mapped directly online. For example, is home office only possible on certain days? Can individual offices only be booked in the afternoon? It should also be possible to store a standard schedule. This saves your employees having to make the same bookings over and over again.