In this article, we will explore the key role of hybrid work, focusing on the contributions of C-suite, managers, employees, and Human Resources (HR) departments.

C-suite: Redefine the new workplace

Enabling hybrid work is no longer merely a matter of IT or security. Instead,
the entire C-suite is joining together to redefine the new workplace
and the technology supporting it.

According to IDC research, 60% of European organizations make workplace strategy choices collectively by numerous members of the C-suite. By “The Okta Hybrid Work Report 2023”, the CEO is the major champion in 57% of organizations in Europe when it comes to introducing new working methods. However, stakeholders in Finance, Operations, IT, Security, Technology, and HR also play important roles.

This shows that where and how people work is now a strategic requirement for corporations and a board-level concern.

Stakeholders from various organizational departments all play important roles in influencing workplace strategy. They also have more say over the technology used to achieve their goals. To create efficient and successful solutions, technology and business teams must collaborate to understand one another’s needs and difficulties.

Managers: Facilitating a Smooth Transition

Managers play a critical role in the implementation of hybrid work arrangements. They must ensure that their teams have the necessary tools and resources to work remotely, while also maintaining productivity and collaboration in the office.

For managers, key responsibilities include:

1. Setting clear expectations: Effective communication is crucial in a hybrid work environment. Managers must establish expectations for work hours, availability, and communication channels to ensure that employees understand their responsibilities.
2. Adapting leadership styles: Managers need to adapt their leadership styles to accommodate both remote and in-office employees. This includes conducting regular check-ins, fostering a sense of belonging, and promoting open communication.
3. Measuring performance: Managers should establish performance metrics that account for remote work, and regularly review employee progress to ensure a fair evaluation process.

Employees: Adapting to New Ways of Working

Employees are essential to the success of hybrid work arrangements as they must adapt to new ways of working and collaborating.

This shift in organizational goals is reflected in Okta’s research. The major motivations for organizations to embrace a hybrid working paradigm are improving employee well-being, increasing productivity, and lowering expenses.

We can see the power of this need in organizations’ readiness to engage in efforts aimed at making hybrid work more comfortable and rewarding for workers.

To better serve their remote and hybrid workforces, the majority of respondents’ organizations are altering procedures and deploying new technologies.

More than three-quarters (77%) of those polled indicated their employer has implemented flexible working hours, and another 21% said their organization would not rule out a shift to more employee-centric scheduling tactics.

To improve the experience of their work-from-anywhere workers, the majority of European firms provide access to training, pay for home office equipment and expenditures, and provide access to corporate subscriptions and wellness initiatives.

For employees, key responsibilities include:

1. Embracing flexibility: Employees should be open to working both remotely and in the office, as required by their role and team dynamics.
2. Maintaining productivity: Remote work can present unique challenges, such as distractions and isolation. Employees should be proactive in addressing these issues and developing strategies to maintain productivity.
3. Communicating effectively: Effective communication is essential for collaboration and team cohesion. Employees should be mindful of their communication habits and ensure they are using appropriate channels and tools for remote work.

Human Resources: The backbone supporting Employees

Organizations are also investing heavily to overcome ‘proximity bias,’ the propensity among leaders to favor people who are physically closer to them in the workplace.

Nearly three-fourths of companies are currently enforcing measures to prevent remote workers from being disadvantaged in organizational processes; Sweden is the leader in combating proximity bias; however, more than half of organizations in both the Netherlands and Germany (57% in each) are also making such investments.

Human Resources (HR) departments are responsible for developing policies and providing support to ensure the successful implementation of hybrid work arrangements and overcome ‘proximity bias’. Key responsibilities include:

1. Developing hybrid work policies: HR should create clear policies and guidelines that outline expectations and requirements for remote and in-office work, and ensure that all employees are aware of these policies.
2. Providing resources and training: HR should provide employees and managers with the necessary resources and training to support remote work, such as technology tools, workspace setup guidelines, and time management strategies.
3. Ensuring inclusivity and fairness: HR must ensure that hybrid work arrangements do not inadvertently create disparities among employees. This includes monitoring remote work practices and adjusting policies as needed to promote fairness and inclusivity.

ONES: Your best choice for hybrid work

To help different parties to work together for developing a successful hybrid working environment, you need a smart office system like ONES.

ONES offers a range of features that cater to the needs of hybrid workers, such as room booking, desk booking, and visitor management. These features not only improve flexibility but also enhance the productivity of workers.

Moreover, as the article highlights, successful hybrid working requires a shift in mindset and a culture of trust and communication. ONES foster such a culture by providing real-time data and analytics on office usage and creating a sense of community through its social features.

By incorporating ONES into their workplace, companies can ensure the success of their hybrid work model. To learn more, schedule a demo today.

The post Who plays the key role in hybrid work? first appeared on ONEs Blog.

On the contrary, several huge digital businesses, such as Amazon and Dropbox, provide employees with far more freedom, including substantial remote work choices. Many non-tech organizations, such as Lego, Deloitte, and 3M, are in the same boat. Thus, are they foregoing social capital?

Tech giant force to implement office work

According to Laszlo Brock, former Google HR chief, three days a week is only a transition time. In the following years, Google’s leadership aims to impose full-time in-office work. The Google leadership’s stance on returning to the office to safeguard social capital is similar to Apple’s, which requires a three-day work week.

This regulation goes against the wishes of many Google employees. A poll of over 1,000 Google workers revealed that two-thirds are dissatisfied with being compelled to work three days a week, with many threatening to leave in internal meetings and public letters, and others already left to work for other firms that offer more flexible schedules.

Recently, study findings show how organizations that shifted their pre-pandemic labor arrangements to remote work during the lockdowns lost social capital. Nonetheless, research shows that by implementing best practices for hybrid and remote work, firms may increase their social capital.

Why Do Companies Undervalue Hybrid Work?

Cognitive biases

Leaders frequently fail to implement best practices due to serious judgment mistakes known as cognitive biases. These mental blindspots influence decision-making in many aspects of life, from business to relationships.

Fortunately, recent research has revealed effective strategies for overcoming these dangerous judgment errors, such as restricting our choices by focusing on the top available options, as demonstrated by this comparison website.

Functional fixedness

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. When we have a preconceived notion of what is proper, we tend to overlook other, more appropriate choices.

Attempting to adapt traditional methods of cooperation in “office culture” to hybrid and remote work is a great example of functional fixedness. That is why leaders failed to address the challenges that would arise as a result of the rapid shift to telework in March 2020.

How to improve your social capital in the hybrid working era

To overcome these cognitive biases that undervalue hybrid work, best practices based on research must be used.

It entails implementing a hybrid-first model, with the majority coming to the office at least once a week and a minority working entirely remotely. To do so successfully, a new work culture that is well-suited to the hybrid and remote future of work is required.

Activity-based working

For example, LEGO’s new headquarters in Denmark has no permanent workstations and that is essentially a large desk-wheel community. It is a “mini-city” that offers facilities, such as a gym and theaters, for colleagues from different departments who can socialize or relax in these areas after a hard day’s work.       

The LEGO Group said that they focus on creating a free and caring environment and aim to promote recreation and productivity.  The strategy taken by the LEGO Group differs in that it appears to take into account the types of work that its workers are performing and provides them with the optimum setting for completing specific roles or tasks.

Office management systems

One of the HR challenges is management procedures and 15% of respondents agree on this point, according to HP Teradici’s survey.

The reason is the admins usually take much time for monitoring the staff’s performance or manage office resources, which makes the admins can’t focus on their work and difficult to maintain good performance.  

Therefore, business leaders should think about how to optimize their employees’ work process and Omdia’s report suggests organizations should plan and deliver technology to help their workers be productive from wherever they are.   

A hybrid office should use a comprehensive office management system, which helps your employees use office resources efficiently, such as rooms, desks, and office equipment, and support them have remote work and virtual meetings with their colleagues in the office.  

Learn more about how hybrid working helps you, and implement your own All-in-one smart office system.

The post Busting the Myth Of Losing Social Capital In Hybrid Work first appeared on ONEs Blog.

Many business leaders have indicated that they will use hybrid work models as their future work models. Here are some great suggestions for organizations to optimize their hybrid workplace for 2023. 

What is a hybrid workplace? 

The hybrid workplace combines in-office and remote work, and the workplace facilities provide flexibility for employees to switch seamlessly between the two work styles. When remote workers enter the office as needed, productivity is not reduced due to adaptation issues.    

Meanwhile, the features of a hybrid workplace are improving employees’ productivity and optimizing work quality for employees.  

At one end of the spectrum is everyone in the office, nine till five, so both restricted time and location. And then at the other end of the spectrum is anywhere around the world at any time. So no restricted time or location. A hybrid is anything that sits in the middle of that.

Harriet Molyneaux, managing director of HSM Consultancy

Examples of hybrid workplace 

Some hybrid workplaces provide friendly work environments with special designs to enhance productivity and retain talent.

You may ask how to create the best hybrid workplace in 2023. Let’s see two successful examples of large enterprises how implementing their hybrid workplaces: LEGO and LinkedIn.    

Example 1: LEGO  

LEGO’s new headquarters in Denmark has no permanent workstations and that is essentially a large desk-wheel community. It is a “mini-city” that offers facilities, such as a gym and theaters, for colleagues from different departments who can socialize or relax in these areas after a hard day’s work.       

The LEGO Group said that they focus on creating a free and caring environment and aim to promote recreation and productivity.  

Example 2: LinkedIn  

The new headquarters of LinkedIn were guided by inclusive design principles, there have rooms that may be used for rest, attention, collaboration, learning, and socialization.  

One of the most significant changes LinkedIn made to the pre-pandemic headquarters design was to replace the traditional workstations, which made up about 40% of the space, with a number of seating areas, each of which served as a distinct “neighborhood” for a different team and was arranged to accommodate their typical activities.  

The reason is hoping to increase the connection among each colleague and then create a great workplace culture to retain their talents. 

Approaches to optimize your hybrid workplace 

The latest survey by HP Teradici, “Hybrid Work 2022 Report: The Strategic Role of the Digital Workspace”, identifies the problems encountered in hybrid work environments and suggests some approaches to optimize your workplace for 2023. 

Approach 1: Improving the technology for remote work  

Some remoting systems or collaboration tools are providing bad quality at work, including virtual connection delay and less collaborative work functions. Therefore, these issues affect remote workers’ productivity.  

Based on HP Teradici’s survey, 59% of respondents said the first challenge is performance or user experience issues, such as latency and pixelation. Also, 32% said the implementation process for remoting technology was too complicated, and 25% of respondents reported that staff adoption of remoting technology had been a hurdle.  

The solution is to choose a great functional collaboration tool for your employees, such as Microsoft Teams, to prevent these problems appear.  

Microsoft Teams provides a stable collaborative work connection and is a simple platform for workers easy to use. And allows your employees to have real-time windowed conversations and virtual meetings.

Also, it supports Microsoft 365 and provides excellent collaborative work. Until January 2022, Microsoft Teams had already over 270 million users.   

Approach 2: Creating or revising a work-from-home policy  

If employees can follow some work guidelines for hybrid work, this can ensure they have positive work performances. 

In HP Teradici’s survey, 85% of respondents said existing company policies have already changed to reflect the new hybrid working environments, which means including setting some hybrid work guidelines for employees.  

For the most important computing issues to address to enable hybrid work, half of the respondents say companies should create or revise a work-from-home policy for hybrid workers.

40% of respondents expect their companies to procure additional hardware for staff, while 37% of respondents would like companies setting up a VPN for employee access to the corporate network.

Approach 3: Providing mobile office configuration  

Flexibility is very important for employees. And providing employees with mobile equipment in the office can give flexibility in their work. Thus, they can work in a flexible location.   

According to a report from Omdia, 48% of the total workforce will work in a mobile or hybrid fashion over the next 2 years. The reason is employees think that working in a flexible workplace makes them happier at work so improving their work quality and productivity.   

More than half (54%) of organizations believe employee productivity has improved with the move to more mobile and hybrid work styles. A hot desk is a mobile equipment that can be found in a hybrid workplace. 

Hot desking is also an organizational workspace system in which desks are used on an ad hoc, first-come, first-served basis by different people at different times. Most business leaders use hot desks to replace lots of fixed desks, therefore this can reduce the size of the workspace and prevent paying high rent or operation costs.  

Approach 4:  Implementing office management systems

One of the HR challenges is management procedures and 15% of respondents agree on this point, according to HP Teradici’s survey.

The reason is the admins usually take much time for monitoring the staff’s performance or manage office resources, which makes the admins can’t focus on their work and difficult to maintain good performance.  

Therefore, business leaders should think about how to optimize their employees’ work process and Omdia’s report suggests organizations should plan and deliver technology to help their workers be productive from wherever they are.   

One of the best solutions is for companies should implement some office management systems, for example, meeting room booking.

A Meeting Room Booking System is used to reserve conference rooms and boardrooms, and also provides multi-room bookings in a second. Some studies have shown a 73% increase in the need for meeting rooms in hybrid office spaces so it is very suitable for hybrid workplaces.  

Thus, the admins can manage the resources easily and ensure the rooms will not be misused. Also, they can maintain their productivity at a high level as they have more time to focus on work. 

The best setup to optimize your hybrid workplace for 2023 

A hybrid office should use a comprehensive office management system, which helps your employees use office resources efficiently, such as rooms, desks, and office equipment, and support them have remote work and virtual meetings with their colleagues in the office.  

ONES is one of the famous all-in-one smart office systems that can help you to easily implement hybrid working at ease.  You can easily perform virtual meetings, desk hoteling, and digital office management with our Room Booking, Desk Booking, and Visitor Management features.     

ONES Software now has a dedicated page to introduce a series of hybrid working measures to help you solve problems. You may wish to go to https://ones.software/hybrid-workspace/ for further reference.    

Contact us: hello@ones.software, or visit ONES Software official website for more information: https://ones.software/. 

The post Optimize your hybrid workplace for 2023  first appeared on ONEs Blog.

The telecommunications and technology giant Telstra’s study in 2022 reported that digital transformation can help businesses in the Asia Pacific (APAC) to optimization of hybrid work.  

The hybrid work experience of your workers can be made or broken by their workplace equipment. For instance, a difficult hot desking tool can make it difficult to enter the office. However, a fantastic one can make choosing a desk and a seat next to coworkers exciting for your staff members.

Digital transformation optimizes the performance of hybrid workers  

The lack of virtual work processes and hybrid office equipment makes it difficult for employees to adapt to the new work environment, which will affect their productivity. Thus leveraging technology to improve the performance of hybrid working, manage office resources easily and reduce operating costs.    

75% of both APAC leaders and employees say that it has become easier to stay engaged and drive cultural exchange with technology. 

How to transform the working style to digital? 

The research shows that there are three key transformation priorities for businesses in the Asia Pacific (APAC): 

1. Increasing investments in emerging technologies; 
2. Improving cybersecurity; and 
3. Increasing the pace of digital transformation; 

According to 45% of APAC leaders polled, the first step—investing in new technology—will be crucial to establishing a successful hybrid work environment as organizations aim to promote team collaboration and communication across remote work locations.  

70% of organizations also say they already have a strategy in place to identify and deploy the right technology and tools to facilitate both office-based and remote work.   

Building a hybrid optimized workplace starts with the right people (your talents).

Geraldine Kor Managing Director, South Asia, Telstra

Equipment suitable for your hybrid workers  

Based on mentioned points above of the research, there are 5 key ways for implementing hybrid work better.   

A multi-functional virtual meeting tool 

As hybrid workers are located in different places, a virtual meeting tool can bring a team together, work one-on-one with stakeholders, and move projects and businesses forward.

A variety of virtual tools is available to help with collaborative work. For example, Microsoft Viva, offers virtual meetings, real-time window communication, and customized teamwork itineraries. 

A good connection in the network 

When hybrid workers work remotely, they are often limited by the speed of the network or data limitations in the area. As a result, network failures can have a major impact on uploading and downloading files. Or in the worst scenario, it is not being able to continue working at all. 

Many hybrid offices are used in conjunction with IoT, when hybrid workers return to work in the office, poor network service may affect the normal use of office equipment. 

Flexible office equipment 

Hybrid workers are used to working in flexible locations and hours, therefore flexibility is a priority for them.

Of course, they have the same request for their work equipment. Hot desking is a good solution for them. It is an organizational workspace system in which desks are used on an ad hoc, first-come, first-served basis by different people at different times.  

Moreover, when a hybrid worker is seated in an uncomfortable position for typing, can easily lead to muscular injuries. Therefore, using fixed furniture may not only affect productivity but also leave employers open to compensation claims from injured employees. 

Relaxing space for conversation 

A Microsoft report found that the leisure space allows employees to have more interaction, and through the exchange of ideas improve technology.

Meanwhile, it provides a place for employees to rest to maintain service quality. In addition, many reports also pointed out that the co-working space helps to establish a company culture and increase the sense of belonging of employees, therefore helping companies retain their talents. 

Independent Office Space and Reservation System

Perhaps it might be less heard of quiet cars and focus rooms in hybrid workspaces, but they are important for hybrid workers because they provide some quiet areas for workers to focus on work.

However, these areas always have many people who want to use them, thus it needs some reservation systems to book these areas. ONES is one of the famous booking systems and has been implemented by various government departments and multinational companies. 

ONES Software now has a dedicated page to introduce a series of hybrid working measures to help you solve problems. You may wish to go to https://ones.software/hybrid-workspace/ for further reference.   

Contact us: hello@ones.software, or visit ONES Software official website for more information: https://ones.software/. 

The post What equipment do hybrid workers need in 2023? first appeared on ONEs Blog.