In a world rocked by the pandemic, a hybrid work model is when your human resources shuffle between on-site work and working from home or anywhere as long as it doesn’t affect their productivity.

A hybrid work model can provide flexibility for the workforce, diversify the organization, and make the employees more productive. If an organization wants to reap the benefits of a hybrid work model, they need to be aware of what mistakes they need to avoid when building a hybrid work model.

In this blog, HRavailable will review some of the common mistakes you should avoid when your company assumes a hybrid work model.

1: Not looking into what employees want from an office

People prefer to be in the office for at least a part of their workweek. But that alone isn’t enough to bring them in. The office needs to be a destination worth commuting to. That starts with a clear understanding of what constitutes a great employee experience in the office for your people. Without it, organizations will continue to struggle to bring people back in or fight a wave of the Great Resignation.

How to fix it?

Start by identifying the hybrid working personalities in your organization.

Understanding the mix of hybrid workers in your organization will be invaluable for evaluating how much office space to keep and how to design it for maximum effect.

2: Underestimate the power of chance meetings

You may have noticed that most hybrid workers expect a workplace that facilitates collaboration. And not just to break free from the digital overwhelm.

Time in the office is their one chance to socialize, build relationships, network, and establish bonds with their colleagues and managers.

It’s not just about optimizing your real estate costs either. Businesses with highly engaged employees see 41% lower absenteeism and considerably higher profitability. If collaboration and chance meetings aren’t happening in your, you’re effectively dealing with the consequences of a poor workplace experience.

To fix it, give people the tools they need to curate more social and collaboration opportunities to promote employee engagement:

3: Lack of visibility and transparency

Employees want to come to the office. The problem is figuring out when best to come in. It’s not enough to just have a solution to book a desk or a meeting room when the rest of it – comparing schedules to pick a meeting time, finding the right spaces with amenities they need and also communicating all that back in an email – taking hours out of their workweek.

This is one of the primary reasons why so many workplace managers struggle to bring people back to the office. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s that setting up another video call is just so much easier and faster.

The solutions to avoid this mistake are:

• Interactive floor plans: offer real-time visibility into people’s movements. You can easily reserve a spot near your teammates and friends.
• Shared work schedules: visualized all in one place to coordinate with your teammates’ working hours and locations for effective collaboration.
• Recurring team meeting schedules that you can easily create and subscribe to.
• Advanced team manager permissions: like reserving desks or rooms on behalf of others to make the most of their ‘in office’ days.

4: Unscalable space booking

One of the biggest drivers of employee anxiety about returning to the office is fear of not finding a desk that matches their needs – at the time they need it. A fear that’s fuelled by a complicated desk booking process that’s buggy or difficult to use, or an excel spreadsheet that is simply incomprehensible.

Employees need more than a solution to book a desk or a room. They want to be able to easily locate a workspace that matches their needs for the day.

Implementing an effective desk booking system, which can be achieved with:

• Easy user experience. Your desk booking app should be a joy to use and a tool that saves time and improves the employee experience.
• Real-time view of space availability (with a floor plan view) updated automatically and showing co-workers in the office.
• Well-rounded safety measures with the ability to block/unblock spaces, self-certification, and touchless mobile check-in.
• Auto desk release to improve desk availability by releasing back to the pool workspaces that haven’t been checked into within a set time limit.
• Scalability. With comprehensive integrations and directory sync, you won’t have to worry about business growth negatively impacting your space management solution or the quality of the user experience.

5: Without a process for optimization

So you’ve repurposed and refurbished your offices. You’re done, right? You’re not. Employees’ needs and expectations, and the way we work will continue to evolve.

The only way to offer a continuously great workplace experience is through a well-established process of data analysis and optimization.

In design thinking, it’s a well-established fact – people often don’t know what they really want until they try it in practice. Hence, the prototyping phase. You need a combination of both: employee surveys and tools that deliver granular space usage insights you need to easily put into action. That includes:

• Space usage data to help you
  • identify the busiest times and areas and forecast demand;
  • assess the efficiency of the workplace setup;
  • identify opportunities to cut real estate;
  • evaluate work patterns and adjust accordingly.

• Flexible policy settings that allow you to:
  • change floor plans, add or remove desks on the fly;
  • A/B test workplace designs;
  • eliminate zombie bookings;
  • respond to changing conditions in real-time.

With this level of actionable data, you’re prepared for any future scenarios. And let HRavailable tell you, managing the workplace experience is a lot easier when you don’t have to do everything yourself, manually.

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