The Rise of the Hybrid Workplace

Introduction

Unprecedented. Pandemic. COVID-19. SaRs-CoV2. Virus. Vaccine. Lockdown.

Words that were barley part of the everyday lexicon are now front and center of the world we live in today. In particular, a core institution of our society, the office, the place of work, has been disrupted with millions upon millions of people forced to transition to remote working. The impact of this transition cannot be understated with ripples being felt across a variety of different social strata.

No matter how you may personally feel on the topic, one thing is for certain, we’ve all been living in a slightly different world, a world where a pandemic is front and center, determining what we can and what we can’t do.

While employees were originally told to work from home at the beginning of the outbreak, things have been a little different all over the place ever since.

Do you go to work, do you work from home, or do you sit around all day waiting for the next government announcement?

Depending on your line of work, you may not be able to work from home. However, those who can work from home, are highly encouraged to do so, protecting themselves and their loved ones from catching the Covid-19 virus.

With that in mind and the pandemic still very much front and center, many organizations and businesses are transitioning to a hybrid workplace, with some staff working from home and others working from the office.

This is becoming popular for several reasons, which will be discussed shortly. In this whitepaper, we present the idea of the hybrid workplace and the various applications that make this possible. But first, we must explain exactly what a hybrid workplace is.

What is a hybrid workplace?

A hybrid workplace combines both remote work, most likely from home, and work from the usual office environment. In the current circumstances, this is a much safer approach to resuming work as normal, well, as close to normal as can be during these unprecedented times.

Some of the advantages include:

• Increased Productivity
• The Opportunity to Tap into a Global Talent Pool
• Business Continuity
• Greater Team Synergies

Building Your Hybrid Workplace

So, you've come to the conclusion that it is indeed time to start implementing a hybrid workplace and you want to know how to begin?

Well, like so many things in the modern digital workplace, the answer stems from the right combination of technology and methodology.

Methodology

The methodology around hybrid work centers on two main questions:

1. How can I ensure my in-office staff are safe & secure and 2. How do I make sure that remote staff are able to work effectively?

Make the Office Safe

While we combat the pandemic, there is no group more in need of stringent health and safety policy quite like your in-office employees.

In a recent Salesforce survey, office workers cited enhanced cleaning and employee health monitoring as the main things an employer can do to comfort returning employees.

At this point, you know the main things to do:

• Adopt rigorous cleaning protocols.
• Ensure adequate supply of items like masks, disinfectants and hand sanitizers
• Establish very strict, enforceable social distancing guidelines
• Implement mandatory mask wearing, especially in communal work areas
• Keep track of employee health and establish protocols to respond to any potential issues

A tool like Lark's Health Reporting can greatly enable that last point with simple one-tap reporting of health indicators, allowing for human resource leaders to keep track on staff if in case urgent contact tracing is required.

Empowering Remote Staff

One of the most challenging aspects of the very sudden shift towards hybrid work has been in dealing with remote staff. As they are not in the physical office, establishing a human dynamic, building bonds and overseeing actual performance are issues that today's managers are confronting on a daily basis.

While the jury is still out on the absolute best way to engage remote staff, many of the same ways in which you keep in-office staff engaged apply.

You will want to double up on efforts to:

Engage staff through virtual teambuilding

Create better rewards systems

Break down communication barriers through more efforts to share and hear from staff on video calls

Equip remote staff with the best technology, like Lark, to allow for better collaboration across geographies.

Train HR & team leads on the unique needs of remote teams whether it be financial or psychological welfare, fairer goal setting and the like.

Technology

A big reason that the global economy could keep running in the midst of this global pandemic was due to an ever more advancing slew of digital solutions that mimicked and even supplanted existing physical paradigms.

Businesses that had already planned to go digital suddenly found themselves leapfrogging competitors, many of them larger and better funded, who rested on legacy.

For the savvy CTO, this new normal has created a truly disruptive moment as the business ecosystem around the world scrambles to create best practices and transition legacy systems and skills into a far more digital era.

According to the 2020 Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey, businesses spent the equivalent of around US$15bn extra a week on technology to enable safe and secure home working during COVID-19. As per the KPMG report, this figure represents one of the largest surges in technology investment in history with the world’s IT leaders spending more than their annual budget rise in just three months, as the global crisis hit, and lockdowns began to be enforced.

Organizations are continuing to add to their technology stack with influential publication CIO stating that organizations plan to spend more on big data/analytics, business process management, mobile devices, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile applications to continue pivoting towards digital with some key tangents being a shift towards online product demos (40%) and virtual networking events (39%).

This trend will keep evolving as seen in a recent survey conducted by Lark and Milieu Insights, only 1 in 5 respondents were very satisfied with their remote work and collaboration setup

It's Time to Adopt a Digital Collaboration Platform

Nowhere was this more apparent than the rise of complex, organization-spanning collaboration platforms designed to do everything from enabling employee communication to meetings, document sharing and more, all from a connected device.

The use of these platforms is paramount to the success of an organization during these difficult times, especially when operating a hybrid workplace. These productivity platforms increase communication effectiveness and help create a virtual office environment, allowing team members to collaborate like never seen before, perhaps even better than in-person.

Collaboration platforms like Lark have an important role to play in increasing remote and hybrid workplace productivity by providing you with the appropriate tools to communicate effectively. The bottom line is, if you want to do business in the modern digital economy, you need to start investing in digital productivity platforms.

For the most part, it seems that industry is well aware of this with a Comscore report stating that During the month of May 2020 there were 109 million users engaging with these select collaboration platforms, which reached 41% of the total U.S. internet audience in May 2020, compared to a reach of 9.9% in May 2019. This represents a 322% increase year-over-year.

Choosing the right collaboration platform is a huge decision for any business and the ramifications of the decision will echo across the organization. Such an investment requires time, patience and a degree of trust in the platform's direction.

How do these platforms support a hybrid work environment?

As previously mentioned, these productivity platforms should hopefully provide you with the tools to collaborate effectively.

For many of the market-leading platforms available, like Lark, include at a basic level the following:

• Meet via video and video conferencing

• Drive cloud storage (both shared and private)

• Shared calendars for effective scheduling

• Chat messaging for different teams

• Business email

• Real-time collaboration on work documents

Make sure you download the full report to see specific examples of these features.

The post-pandemic ‘hybrid’ workplace

As restrictions are slowly lifted, we are likely to see an increase in organizations implementing a hybrid workplace strategy. Not only is this safer, but many organizations are likely to have witnessed first hand the benefits of remote work and fewer staff working from the office.

There is also an array of benefits for the employees too, including reduced travel expenses and stress, an increase in flexibility, fewer conversations and distractions throughout the day, and increased concentration. We understand these benefits are not evident for all people, but for the majority, this is the case and to a large extent, here are some of the changes we expect to see as part of this seismic shift:

• Expanding technology budgets
• Adopting a phased return approach
• Attitudes towards the way productivity is viewed have changed

To conclude

Even as the vaccine rolls out across countries, the workplace is forever changed. What form this change will take is still being debated but the early research, such as this study from Stanford shows that remote working can actually improve productivity, up to 13 percent as cited in the study and in a Lark and Milieu Insights survey, a whopping 94 percent of professionals, managers and executives want flexible working arrangements to stay.

The clarion call for managers seems simple: the time to evolve to hybrid working is now and looking at your technology stack is perhaps the best place to start.

Without the use of productivity platforms and technology, the rise of the hybrid workplace would most certainly not be possible. If your team is transitioning, you should look into these platforms as mentioned in this whitepaper, finding the best one for you and your team.