Today, coming to work isn’t just limited to traveling to the office but now allows people to do it at home as well. With this, it can provide people with maximum flexibility and comfortability, enabling them to work right from the comforts of their homes. While some companies can go for a full work-from-home setup, some businesses prefer to work with a hybrid setup.
A hybrid setup allows your employees to work in the office some days a week and return to work from home for the remaining days. However, if your company is still planning to go with this work setup, you must prepare your office well. And as you proceed with some office renovations, below are some ways you can develop your office into a hybrid setup-ready:
Plan Your Transition
Planning your transition is one of the first things you can do to prepare your office for a hybrid setup. Hybrid work setup doesn’t happen overnight. You need to plan every small detail in your workplace meticulously. Your employees won’t start working in a hybrid structure without prior knowledge or information on how the setup will be.
Planning your transition helps you and your employees be more ready once the hybrid work setup starts. You can discuss the rules on how the hybrid setup works and how it could benefit them. It’s not enough to tell them that the company will be transitioning to a new working setup; you need to explain why this change would be essential and how it would affect them.
Create A Clear Work Policy
Transitioning to a hybrid work setup can be confusing to some employees. Employees would tend to raise many questions regarding the new set-up, especially regarding the company policy and rules. They would like to know whether there will be changes to the current policy that could affect their work. Make sure that you’re prepared to explain and answer your employees.
To avoid confusion within the workplace, you should establish a clear work policy on the new hybrid setup for every team member. It will help them know what to expect and determine the allocation of resources. It will also help them be more informed on the changes and help them to still deliver quality work.
Ensure Consistency Across Your Workplace
When all employees are working in the same workplace, it’s easier to ensure the consistency of the work and deliverables they produce. It is one of the important things that you should focus on to prepare for a hybrid work setup, ensuring that everyone has the same software, apps, tools, and programs when working. Should there be disparate tools they are using, their work would automatically produce discrepancies.
To avoid this during the hybrid setup, ensure that your remote and onsite employees use the same programs and software. Once you’re sure that all devices are the same, it could indicate that you have prepared your company well for a hybrid setup. Keep in mind that you should maintain consistency throughout the time by having your IT department check with your employees since there are apps that are being updated from time to time.
Introduce Collaboration Tools
Since the company would be working in many different locations, make sure that your employees have the necessary collaboration tools to keep them engaged with one another. Providing the essential collaboration tools, such as communication, mind mapping, project management, file sharing, and prototyping, allows them to work seamlessly with their teammates. They can also use those tools if they want to meet with one another, even though they are all working separately.
With the right collaboration tools, it’s easier for the employees to stay organized and effective. They can meet with each other as if they’re face-to-face, which can provide them with an area to have discussions. Ensure that your collaboration tools are working correctly before starting the hybrid setup, as this is important.
Provide Necessary Resources
To prepare your company for a hybrid setup, ensure that you can provide the necessary resources, peripherals, and equipment for your onsite and remote employees. Providing proper resources for your employees allows them to deliver their work without issues. For your onsite employees, you need to make sure that they have ample space for their workstations, while for your remote employees, you need to ensure that their equipment will not encounter any problems.
Your employees rely on whatever resources you give them. You can add anything related to properly using company-provided equipment to your work policy, especially for those working remotely. Your employees should not misuse any resources since they should only use them for their work.
Provide Training Materials
Since your company will be transitioning into a hybrid setup, it’s essential that you provide them with any training material they may need. It would allow them to continue developing their skills, which would then help them provide quality work for the company. It would also benefit those employees who want to build up their knowledge and take different courses.
Training materials would also include documents on procedures, SOPs, or any document that could help them with their work. Even though training courses are helpful, it would also be better if your employees could easily access the procedures. It allows them to view the procedure should they have any issues while working, especially for those who will work remotely.
Ensure Good Network Speed
A good network speed can tell you if your company is ready for a hybrid setup. Ensuring a good and stable network speed allows your servers to be up and running. It should be one of your priorities, especially the company’s files, users such as your employees, stored on your servers. It just means that your company relies on the state of your servers.
Your employees, especially remote ones, will have a hard time connecting to their work, especially if the server is down or unstable due to slow network speed. Unlike your onsite employees, it would be easier for your IT department to reach out and check what’s wrong with their devices since they are already in the office. Make sure you have a good network speed running in the office, so if there are any issues with your remote employees, you can always rule out any network connectivity issues within the office. Thus, it would always be assumed that the problem is on the remote workers’ end.
Takeaway
Preparing your office for a hybrid setup can be challenging and tricky. But with the early and right preparation, you can allow everyone to work with ease and be comfortable working in any environment. This way, you can guarantee productivity and ensure that there would be no effect on their work output.
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