Is Hybrid Working Here to Stay?
The year 2020 changed work forever. Covid-19 fast tracked the move from the traditional office based work model to a more flexible arrangement offering a balance of office and home working.
According to a report produced by Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 73% of employees surveyed expressed a desire for flexible office/home working post pandemic, and 66% of businesses said they were considering redesigning physical office layouts to better accommodate hybrid working environments.
Now, let’s be honest – no one really knows what the future will bring. But it should be safe to predict that for the immediate future, hybrid working is the new norm – so here are some tips to get the best out this new world:
1. Equip your team to succeed, not just mentally but also physically
When we talk about hybrid working, we typically reach for the heavy hitting terms – ‘Cloud’, ‘Hybrid’, ‘Platform’; but let’s not underestimate the difference a decent chair and computer screen can make to your employee’s productivity whist working from home.
2. Empower your staff with the best tools to do their job
The most successful teams use a combination of tools to get the best out of their time and creativity. Microsoft Teams Phone is great, but let’s not discard Outlook, CRM systems, online proposal tools, efficient accounting systems to name but a few.
3. Be flexible
Your staff have gone the extra mile for you when first lockdown happened. They continued to work from home in questionable working conditions, they worked days and evenings, they made it all happen.
So is it really a problem if your best employee asks for 25 minutes at 3pm to pick their daughter up from school?
4. Teach time management
As patronising as this may sound, your team may need some time management guidance from you. They were asked to do something different overnight and working from home is different – research finds that the majority of staff interviewed take fewer breaks and often skip lunch in order to keep up with the back-to-back video calls.
There is less and less reflection time left in the day and this time is arguably more important than sitting in the background of certain video calls (the kind where you say the initial hello, then mute yourself for 45 minutes and then say, “Have a nice day, byeee”).
5. Use an IT platform fit for purpose
It’s time to stop thinking of ‘remote’ and ‘office’ working environments – this way of thinking is so eighties!
Why should your teams have to work differently whilst at home or the office? It’s not like you ask your staff to do a different job at home, is it?
Your team is craving a simple IT platform that just works – at home, in the office, at the airport or on the train.
Get in touch now to discuss what options are available to you and your business. PurpleUC has decades of experience in IT services including internet connectivity and modern IP telephony and is a platform/vendor agnostic provider of both. PurpleUC is a subsidiary of Purple Matrix, a Tier 1 Microsoft Gold partner.