4 Strategies For Scaling and Sustaining A Hybrid Workforce With Confidence

Chief Technology Officer

The pandemic has introduced many new phrases into vocabularies across the globe. One of these is a hybrid working environment. Whilst many businesses have used location-flexible arrangements in one way or another for some time, the merits of such a scheme are now well-recognised.

Allowing employees to combine onsite and offsite work comes with a range of benefits, when managed properly. Scaling and sustaining such a working environment requires team leaders to adopt new approaches to team culture and workplace practices in order to help employees adjust and complete work with greater confidence and productivity.

Strategy #1: Keep Productivity Consistent

For some team leaders, the perception that employees are less productive when working from home acts as a real barrier to accepting and adopting a hybrid working environment. However, productivity in a hybrid working environment can be effectively managed.

Keeping productivity consistent in a hybrid workforce comes down to providing employees with clear rules and processes, updating employee success measurements to represent this change and making sure that collaboration is possible and remains seamless.

In a hybrid working environment, communication is key. Otherwise, employees won’t know who to report to. Providing guidelines will help employees overcome this confusion, allowing them to focus on the task at hand.

To sustain a hybrid workforce, employee success can no longer be measured by the number of hours worked. The very essence of a hybrid workforce is the notion of flexibility. So, measuring productivity by tasks completed and targets reached will provide better insight.

Finally, employees cannot be expected to be productive when their home office and work setups are different. Getting used to a new interface or operating system when you go into the office or work from home is time consuming and therefore unproductive.

Strategy #2: Embrace Hybridity – It’s Revolutionary

In the beginning, a hybrid workforce where some employees worked from home and others worked in the office was the answer to social distancing and health and safety requirements. Yet, now as the world tries to regain some semblance of normality, hybridity is the way forward.

Instead of a passing trend, for Sean Byrne, Head of Video Collaboration for Logitech in ANZ, the notion of a hybrid workforce is “… the next social revolution of how we work. The Covid-19 pandemic is facilitating change whereby workforces are no longer restricted to four walls…”

For Sean, this new working environment is a game changer. He remarked that “with hybridity, you can hire the best candidates for your roles [without being restricted by location] and elevate your workplace.”

The industrial revolution birthed the 8 hour work day. The suffrage movement instigated social change. The pandemic has brought to the fore the potential of a hybrid workplace and like other movements in history, it will forever change the way we work. Instead of biding time, embrace hybridity because flexible employment is the way forward.

Strategy #3: Be Creative In Fostering Workplace Culture 

Company culture is essential to the success of a business, whether its workers be full time, part time, remote or hybrid. In a hybrid working environment, company culture may seem hard to foster and nurture.

However, Sean says that “cultural interactions are not lost outside of the workplace, you just have to find ways to be creative.” Never has there been a greater companion to creativity than technology.

So, instead of letting after work drinks or water cooler chats be things of the past, think outside the box. In Sean’s words, ‘Implementing stand up meetings, online check-ins, virtual water cooler environments can be the glue that makes your team united and actively engaged in achieving shared outcomes’. Create a virtual water cooler where employees can log in when they feel like interacting with others. Host after work zooms where you try out new cocktail recipes or play virtual games.

When it comes to fostering workplace culture in a hybrid working environment, keep employee’s needs and lived experiences at the centre of management decisions. Be intentional about communication, keep traditions alive and maintain a focus on work/life balance.

As Sean says, “it’s important to create an environment that fosters communication and openness so people can always understand each other and how they are going.” This way, every employee in the hybrid workforce feels connected, ensuring success while also laying the foundation for any future attempts to grow the team.

Strategy #4: Create a Hybrid Ecosystem

A hybrid workforce needs top of the line communications that take them as close as possible to being with co-workers in a physical office. Otherwise, the change from working in an office to working from home will be a gap too great to bridge.

While the transition to a hybrid working environment may seem like a leap too great, digital collaboration technologies can make the transition seamless, keeping colleagues connected and productivity levels high. From the perspective of Logitech’s Head of Video Collaboration, Sean Byrne, scaling growth in a hybrid context is about ensuring the supply of products to end-users, and that for decisions made by enterprises around particular conferencing webcams for example, we have the ability to supply that webcam in volume to everybody that needs it, within the workplace and at home.

Webcams, headsets and video conferencing solutions, are key to achieving an anytime and anywhere approach to collaboration. In fact, without the proper technology , ensuring productivity and fostering company culture becomes almost impossible.

Logitech makes creating a hybrid ecosystem easy, thanks to a range of fit-for-purpose video collaboration solutions. As Sean says “we have created a hybrid ecosystem that end-users can deploy en masse, from both a product volume and product interaction perspective.”

Monitoring, managing and measuring video devices as well as meeting rooms is important when it comes to adoption and usability of your video collaboration solutions. That’s why Logitech goes to great lengths to ensure your chosen product/s are a perfect fit, leaving your employees feeling well-equipped and eager to collaborate regardless of their location.

Choose Logitech to Help You Create and Sustain A Hybrid Workforce

The future of the workplace is very much intertwined with the concept of a hybrid workforce. The pandemic gave workers time at home and greater work/life balance and it showed employers that workers can be productive at home.

For some however, working from home wasn’t ideal. That’s why workplaces of the future will be hybrids. Sustaining this type of workforce will involve scaling up efforts to make workplaces hybrid friendly.

Scaling and sustaining this type of workforce doesn’t happen overnight. Success lies in crafting and deploying strategies that keep employees motivated and tech-confident to work. The most important strategy centres around implementing universal and comprehensive technology.

Speak to a Logitech representative today to uncover ways that will not only scale your team’s hybrid environment, but also work to build the foundation for a productive, informed, connected and successful hybrid workforce.