2020 and 2021 brought a new era of remote working to the workplace. Working remotely can provide many benefits including employee satisfaction, better for the environment, reduce employee turnover and improve productivity for your workforce.
Over the coming months we expect to start seeing employees working in a hybrid environment as part of the “new normal”.
What is Hybrid Working?
Hybrid working enables employees to work form a variety of locations, including home, the workplace and other remote locations.
Effective hybrid working means that employees have the tools and process available to them to work as effectively from any location without being hindered.
What are the challenges of hybrid working?
There are many challenges to fully enable hybrid working in a workplace which have been outlined below:
Communication
It is very easy for employees to become siloed when working in different locations. Traditional platforms like Email and Skype are particular focused on legacy ways of communication and can cause drain on your staff and productivity.
In the absence of an office environment its difficult for teams to have an awareness of what’s going on. Employees working together can cc other team members which will cause a huge drain on productivity or end up primarily using 1 to 1 communications meaning the rest of the team can’t input if they have valuable ideas or experience to assist their team.
Tools & Hardware
Many organisations haven’t been geared for remote working pre covid and have rushed to provide employees laptops or other equipment. Cheap headsets can work effectively from home but without noise cancelling features these very quickly become useless in a noise environment like an office.
Change of Culture
Moving to a hybrid working environment is a huge change of culture and requires investment from organisations to make this happen. Moving to new working practices, processes and tools does not happen overnight and is not achieved by simply providing training. It requires the whole organisation to shift and adapt the way they are working to a new mindset.
Management
There is still a tendency from management to want to revert to the old way of working. This will present challenges as it’s inevitable that staff will not be happy if they are forced back to commuting every day and other organisations will provide remote working opportunities. This will ultimately lead to a much higher staff retention.
What tools are available in Microsoft 365 to assist?
The whole of Microsoft 365 provides an effective toolset for hybrid working and is fundamental to building a modern workplace.
One particular tool stands out as a key product if implemented correctly which is Microsoft Teams with tools like SharePoint, Planner & To Do to support this.
Microsoft Teams enables employees to bring everything into one place and consolidate tools into one tool.
How Amnu can help?
Amnu have been operating a hybrid working environment since it was founded and before Covid-19.
We’ve established our own effective working models. We utilise Microsoft Teams for all internal communications and only send emails for formal communications like appraisals and contractual changes.
Utilising Microsoft Teams as our primary internal communications channel means the team always has an awareness of what others are working on and can input as required. Everything related to a particular project such as files, meetings and communications are all held in one place.
We’ve helped many organisations adopt similar models for hybrid working by focusing on an organisations defined way of working and how the tools will be use used. Adoption can then be laser focused on that departments use of the tools rather than overwhelming users with every feature and function available to them.