Top 5 Things to Get Right in Your Hybrid Office
Managing a hybrid workplace can quickly become a seemingly insurmountable challenge. However, if you can get the basics right, then you’ll be well on your way to hybrid-work success! We’ll unpack a few principles to assist you as you build the workplace your people deserve.
- Design for functionality
- Design for employee engagement
- Allow for flexibility
- Continually assess your workplace setup
- Use great space management software
Design for Functionality
Hybrid work is a mix of working from the office and away from the office. Your teams are able to choose when they’ll work in the office now. This should lead you to ask a very important question: What are the work tasks best accomplished in the office? A few of these tasks may be collaborative in-person meetings, deep focus work that requires private workstations, heavy design work or related activities that require specific company equipment to do well, or onsite customer meetings that require a professional company setting.
Essentially, you should view a switch to hybrid work as an opportunity to redesign your workplace so that it promotes productivity in the work that is best performed in your office space. Work that can be done as well, or better, in an out-of-office environment need not be accommodated in your office space!
Design for Employee Engagement
Even as you design your office space to support productive, efficient work, you’ll also find great value in designing a workplace that, when your teams do come into the office, makes them excited about it. This does, of course, involve the point we already discussed above, but it also means that you should invite your people to weigh in on the other elements that make up an engaging workspace.
Ask them, “When you come into the office, what about its design would make for a more engaging, supportive environment that would enable you to do your best work?” These kinds of open-ended questions prime your people to share from their unique perspectives, as opposed to yes/no which can be prone to stifling creativity.
Remember, in light of the current global job market, even things like your office space can be used as your company’s ‘competitive edge’ to attract top talent to your business. Do your best to build your offices with this in mind!
Also, don’t forget reading about: Ways to Enhance the Coworking Management
Allow for Flexibility
The temptation for many companies is to, after transitioning to a hybrid model, expect people to be in the office for a minimum number of days to keep up with an ‘attendance’ metric of sorts.
We’d advise that you wade into this issue carefully. If you design your workplace for effective work, and rate job performance based on outcomes rather than ‘hours sat’, it would be antithetical to expect your teams to maintain some kind of totemic compliance with the working models of yesteryear.
We’d encourage you to design your workplace for functionality and employee engagement, measure job performance by output and outcomes, and then allow your teams the freedom to manage their hybrid work schedule in ways that promote these ends.
Continually Assess Your Workplace Setup
Workplace design should never be a ‘one-and-done’ endeavor for your company. To truly keep your employees engaged with your office space, and to make things easier to stay on top of in an ever-changing world of work. Keep channels of communication open with your people, and conduct regular pulse surveys so that you can plan ahead with fresh data and insights when working on your workplace’s design.
Use Great Space Management Software
Of course, this article wouldn’t be complete without a recommendation to get hold of space management software that will support you and your teams as you bravely chart a course towards hybrid work success! Implementing a great space management system will allow you to focus on the work that matters while automating tedious, repetitive tasks related to the booking and scheduling of your office spaces. Work like this is best handled by a dedicated, specialized platform rather than attempting to manage bookings with a spreadsheet!
Skedda is the World’s Leading Space-management Platform
Skedda is the world’s leading space-management platform, and it removes the hassle of manually managing the booking and scheduling of your spaces. It’s the perfect booking platform for your desks, rooms, parking spaces, and more!
Our team is available right now to discuss your unique requirements. Why not reach out today to discover how Skedda can work for you?
