Remote and hybrid work has gained more popularity during and after the outbreak of Covid-19. Flexible work has been found to keep employees more productive and happy, a fact acknowledged by employers worldwide. Working from home/anywhere has become a vital strategy for organizations to increase employee productivity.
Post Covid-19, companies are increasingly adopting hybrid work schedules by encouraging employees to work from the comfort of their homes for part of a week. The Accenture 2021 study “Future of Work: A Hybrid Work Model” found that 83% of the 9326 employees surveyed confirmed their allegiance to hybrid work, wherein they got to work at least 25% of the time remotely. Another key finding of the study was that “responsible leaders must move beyond physical location to shape the future of work by giving people resources tailored to their needs.” The same study report also documents that 63% of high-growth companies have already embraced a ‘productivity anywhere’ workforce model. And more companies are expected to follow suit! This data indicates companies that enable their employees to be productive and healthier anywhere have succeeded in improving bottom lines.
Read more: 5 Tips to Improve Remote Collaboration
How Hybrid Work Model Increase Employee Efficiency?
A hybrid work model serves to improve employee efficiency in a multitude of ways. Here are a few:
1. Hybrid work calls for smart digitization of business processes.
Hybrid work requires the adoption of smart digital workplace platforms to enable your dispersed employees to communicate and collaborate with their remote team members to get their work done. Digitization of business processes endows your business with technical capabilities to fast-track its operations while training your employees in state-of-the-art technologies to help the latter upskill themselves and improve their efficiency.
2. Increases productivity
Flexible work lets employees work to their strengths, thus serving to increase their productivity. The hybrid work model encourages teams to leverage cloud technologies to find an optimum balance of creativity and collaboration to meet goals.
3. Improves employee satisfaction and culture
Getting to decide on how, where, and when to work to meet the organizational goals increases employee satisfaction by leaps and bounds. This autonomy in decision-making serves to boost productivity.
4. Increases collaboration and betters work relationships
Regular virtual meetings help track the progress of projects while facilitating your geographically diverse teams to communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently over the digital platform in a connected world. A digital workplace solution offers your employees an avenue to contribute proactively toward meeting goals smarter and faster, thus strengthening relationships in the event.
5. Better work-life balance improves mental health
Hybrid work enables your employees to have a better work-life fit which is very important or their mental well-being. Getting to weave their work around their life allows your employees never to leak their energy into their work, thus decreasing their stress levels. This flexible work schedule prevents your employees from burnout, increasing their productivity.
Digitization improves the efficiency of both the employees and the employers, thus rendering your business processes smarter. Having said that, it doesn’t imply adopting hybrid work would be a cakewalk for companies. Hybrid work poses its own share of challenges to employers.
Read more: 12 Ways To Drive A Connected Workplace
Two Major Challenges of the Hybrid Work Model
1. Nurturing company culture when working remotely
Companies are worried about growing a company culture around remote work that aligns with their core values and beliefs. The fear of physical distances hindering the development of company culture is amiss. Smart digital workplace solutions come equipped with the right communication and collaboration tools to keep your employees engaged at work and involved in team-building activities to enrich their experiences. Decision-makers must implement an employee-first culture to nurture their remote teams.
2. Fear that employee well-being might be at risk
Digital workplace solutions enable employees to seamlessly access data vital to their business operations. Increased levels of communication and collaboration might lead to your employees being bombarded with an overload of information that they may fail to disseminate, leading to higher levels of work stress and burnout. This will adversely affect your employees’ well-being. This problem can be resolved by choosing a smart digital workplace solution with custom capabilities to integrate the right tools to suit your business. InfinCE is a smart digital workplace solution that ensures the right data reaches relevant people through its highly customizable smart features. You needn’t settle for a one-size-fits-all kind of digital workplace solution anymore! You can use custom dashboards to simplify your employee data analytics and streamline the management of your information assets. Custom dashboards help analyze performances through smart people analytics and use it to manage and assign tasks to optimize your manpower.
Tips to Reimagine the Well-being of a Hybrid Remote Workforce
1. Hybrid working model helps make human connections
A fully remote workforce might miss the human connections and relationships they once enjoyed at their on-site workplaces. Hybrid work would allow your teams to meet at their physical office premises periodically and enjoy casual, personal interactions with their peers like they once did. This will help eliminate the feeling of disconnect that fully remote employees might feel.
2. Implement hybrid work as a strategy and train leaders to manage new work schedules
Business leaders and managers need to be trained to leverage cloud technologies to manage their hybrid workforce and track their work effectively so that their teams remain engaged and productive. They should be empathetic to the needs of their employees.
3. Integrate smart tools to streamline communication
Digital workplace solutions come equipped with an array of smart tools to facilitate file sharing, virtual meetings, chatbots, etc., to enable seamless communication among your diverse teams. The right sets of tools ensure that data remains transparent and silos are broken while ensuring the communication remains relevant.
4. Make employee wellness programs an essential part of your business strategy
HR teams must plan workshops and programs to help employees destress and unwind. These could include classes on meditation, stress management, fitness challenges, etc. Employee wellness programs help boost employee loyalty and reduce attrition.
5. Build digital fluency
Digital fluency is critical to improving revenues. Companies must adopt digital working solutions tailor-made to suit their business. Technology is vital to help your remote teams stay connected in a physically disconnected work scenario.
Read more: 6 Ways to Improve Engagement of Your Digital Employees
Summing up
Creating opportunities that optimize communication and cater to the mental well-being of your employees is thus vital for business growth. You must maintain transparency in your communication to build a culture of trust among your hybrid working teams. Hence, you must adopt the right kind of tools and applications to help your business remain agile to meet its ever-changing needs. This is where a smart digital workplace solution like InfinCE comes in handy.
InfinCE is a feature-rich digital platform that can help you manage your hybrid workforce through its,
- Custom dashboards that enable smarter data analysis and improve business efficiency by tracking the progress of projects in real-time
- Varied collaboration apps that enable seamless communication among your dispersed teams through a comprehensive employee directory; live individual and group chats; and individual/group audio/video calls
- Curated marketplace that includes a multitude of applications to suit any business or industry
- A suite of productivity apps that includes online office tools, business email, and secure file sharing to enable faster and smarter execution of tasks
- Seamless IT infrastructure management from a single place to enable better visibility and much more!
Get in touch with our experts or experience a live demo to know how InfinCE can be an asset to your digitization endeavors.
