Table of Contents
The majority of workspaces are essentially intended to accommodate an onsite workforce. For a mobile, adaptable, and hybrid workforce, old workspaces just don’t fit the new model. Organisations need to develop areas, procedures, and technologies that allow their staff to communicate and cooperate if they want to keep up with the growth of the market. Let’s take a look at some of the technological and physical factors that can enhance the hybrid experience for all employees, both online and at the office.
9 Tips for Newly Hybrid Businesses
Provide Different Meeting Spaces
Expect the workplace to primarily transform into a hub for collaborating if you switch to a hybrid model, with the majority of discussions likely becoming hybrid meetings involving a few remote attendees. So, it is just as crucial to consider remote workers when creating and redesigning meeting places as it is to accommodate people who are interacting in the actual office. You will need to plan for smaller conferencing spaces, smaller gathering spots, private seating areas, and other more compact meeting spaces.
Business leaders also need to plan for typical meeting places that can hold multiple employees that have the necessary hardware for communicating with remote attendees. There will likely need to be some renovation for these changes, so a simple Google search for a “handyman near me” will provide a list of nearby options. Alternatively, you can have a look through MyBuilder.com for a list of trusted and vetted choices close by.
Ensure All Spaces Have Video Conferencing Capabilities
There will probably be a number of online attendees in any and every discussion due to the rise in remote employment, and as a result, there is a rise in demand for facilities that are equipped for virtual meetings. Making sure that all conference spaces, no matter the size, are outfitted to provide a seamless connection to offsite attendees is just as crucial as offering a range of conference rooms.
Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM) solutions like Zoom and Teams are much more versatile and affordable to deploy since they replace the conventional conferencing equipment with a setup that can be operated from participants’ devices. This enables businesses to transform any area into a conferencing-ready facility. In the ideal hybrid office, seating and gathering areas, meeting rooms, and also temporary spaces can be quickly retrofitted with the necessary equipment to enhance collaboration and communication.
Support Health, Safety, and a Positive User Experience
There aren’t shared devices or touching random surfaces necessary since BYOM systems use individual user devices to power collaboration and conferencing. This can result in a fully touchless conference environment from beginning to end. BYOM solutions offer a better user-friendly interface that makes it simpler to share information and collaborate on projects since they are built on the tech that staff are already using and familiar with. Besides collaborative connectivity, touchless office solutions also enable digital reception/check-in options, face detection, attendance counts, and a host of other features that help businesses better protect their staff and outside visitors.
Ways for Workers to Connect and Collaborate
Besides room layout and conferencing or collaboration technologies, it’s crucial to think about how your employees will interact with one another. Tools that simplify things for employees and allow them to seamlessly interact and communicate will be essential as your workspace becomes more dynamic and more unpredictable in regard to who could be at work on any particular occasion.
Meeting room options, occupancy monitoring, and room booking can and should be facilitated by collaboration software, with key features like calendar connectivity, usage counts, workplace layout, and service information. This should make it simpler to locate co-workers and work collaboratively with them in a more fluid workplace.
Arrange Flexible Workstation Options
You should consider updating the design of the limited office space as communication and cooperation become more of a priority. One approach is to scale back the size of personal workspaces to match the decline in office-based employees.
An intelligent workstation strategy that allows for flexible support of fewer office-based employees while opening up more room for meeting and collaboration areas, without needing an office expansion, is the deployment of hotel desks or “hot desks” that could be reserved for a certain time for particular intervals. Managing the use of available space will be one of the biggest issues, so ensure you consider all your requirements before drawing up any plans.
Support for Overflow
Businesses may wish to think about possibilities for overflow rooms that enable staff to spread out a little more for conferences, enabling socially distant cooperation, as more workers are returning to the workplace. You should think about the types of conference rooms that are more likely to be used for bigger gatherings and may require backup seating to accommodate extra participants.
Consider the areas that can handle this extra volume. Perhaps there may be additional meeting space nearby, perhaps in the main office or down the hallway. Adopting software-based video networking across the office can also give participants the ability to attend hybrid sessions from different spots and cut down on software conflicts.
Prepare for Pervasive Communications
Given that employees might only visit the workplace occasionally or infrequently, tools for pervasive communication styles like digital signage can assist firms to communicate key corporate messages across their locations. Digital signage can be employed to promote future courses, activities, or company announcements as well as to broadcast security advice and regulations from the company. If collaboration technology is not being actively used, it can then provide workplace-wide messages thanks to fully integrated banner recordings that can be looped.
Staff can be reminded of the building’s maximum capacity with customised greeting screens. Personnel can simply learn about future discussions, maintenance schedules, and information sessions thanks to greeting screens that incorporate this timetable information.
Use Workplace Analytics
The recent pandemic has significantly restructured the workforce by demonstrating how quickly routine living may be interrupted. Today more than ever, information on collaborative environments is needed to make well-informed choices for both short- and long-term workspaces, infrastructure, and technological development.
Workplace analytics can include information on popular conferencing times, peak occupancy, the proportion of onsite versus online meeting participants, the most frequently used video conferencing platforms, the equipment that employees use to access files, and much more. To gain crucial insights and help control getting back to work, these patterns can be examined among meeting rooms, places, or other relevant factors.
Frequently Request Feedback
Improved attentiveness to employees and their requirements is needed for hybrid work. Assessing how hybrid actions affect employee welfare, inspiration, participation, teamwork, and performance depends on their feedback. Because of this, businesses all around the globe conduct frequent staff surveys. Many of them are now gathering regular input from their employees, whereas they previously just conducted yearly employee engagement surveys.
Most employers often struggle to gather feedback from all their staff, particularly the difficult-to-reach frontline workers. Using the appropriate tech that allows you to communicate with the correct person, with the appropriate message, at the required time is essential for gathering insightful feedback from staff.
Finally, stay adaptable. In order to meet the requirements of a hybrid workforce both today and in the future, it’s going to be essential to create workplaces and select tech that is versatile and accommodates both onsite and online team members.
