Remote vs. hybrid working culture: Understanding the future of work
Remote vs. hybrid working culture; both come with their own unique nuances and pitfalls. Organizations have quickly adapted to a remote working culture now while also ensuring collaboration and finding new ways to monitor productivity. A Microsoft team study shows that their employees collaborated through online mode for more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes across its education and business, which was just 900m in early March 2020.
Understanding your business requirements and accordingly, adopting the right workspace, matters the most. Hybrid culture involves team to work in space of direct human-proximity and minimizes communication gap to a great extent before employees start working remotely.
What includes a hybrid working culture?
As the word “hybrid” suggests, it refers to a working culture where some of the employees work remotely and others, work from a common office-space. Adopting a hybrid work culture allows the employees to select between working in an office, remotely and alternating between the two.
Firstly, this innovative approach permits your team to have face-to-face communication space for team members. Secondly, it allows a company to hire beyond a particular geographical area.
Another good reason for this approach is that it comes with the work flexibility option, which makes it even more popular among the millennial generation. A study by Catalyst shows that by 2025, millennials will take up almost three-quarters of the global workforce. This is why; it is a good opportunity for companies to set their workspace according to these new digital natives’ preferences. Most importantly, a look at the team capacity of a team is important for the management team to adopt a successful hybrid –remote work environment.
Types of distributed teams
Based on workspace setup, three types of distributed teams are usually preferred.
Split Teams: Companies prefer split teams when their business processes are expanded in multiple nations. For example, it may be good for a US-based company that has a branch office, located in New Delhi. Both teams are located in two different countries in this setup, but they are working remotely to achieve a common goal. However, they need to ensure strong team collaboration and a good strategic approach to handle it best.
Hybrid Teams: Hybrid team is a customized form of new remote work. Generally, under this work culture, less than 50% of employees work outside the office or remotely, and the rest, from a common office-space. In case of any need, the remote counterpart visits the office and works with the “in-house” team members. Hybrid culture has a mix of both onsite and remote operation that comes with the flexibility perk of remote work while also eliminating some major bottlenecks of the system.
Fully Remote Team: A fully remote team is when all employees of an organization work from their location. This not only helps the employee to maintain a work-life balance but also allows the company to get the task done simultaneously. It eliminates daily commuting time and ultimately increases productivity.
A technically strong system will further enhance your team’s efficiency.
It is up to the organization to decide what kind of tea will be best for its employees. However, we recommend you to look out for the following parameters to make your decision:
- Business needs
- Importance of human proximity to take future business decisions
- Technical strength
- Geographical constraints
.
Why hybrid working is the future of remote operation?
In the present Covid-19 era, technology and digitalization have made remote working popular. Offices have now opened up with minimal staff with certain restrictions and social distancing rules in mind. Making all the employees work from office will not be a great choice, and hence, most of the originations have adopted a hybrid culture to operate. Internal collaboration and internal communication like staff meetings, brainstorming, or any work that involves employee participation is best when they are operated from one-location. This is why hybrid working culture always has an advantage over both complete remote culture and traditional work; as it covers both areas.
Whether it is post-pandemic situation or normal circumstances, below mentioned are few reasons for organizations to count on “hybrid working cultures”.
A mix of both worlds: In a hybrid working culture option; you have both office-based and home-based employees at the same time. You can hire talented employees not restricted to a geographic location. A diversified team is always helpful if you have customers or clients from different parts of the world and different time zones.
Cost Efficient: Minimize your cost of rental space and office supplies when half of your employees work from home. Besides saving annual rental costs, employees also save time and money simultaneously.
An enhanced approach to employee collaboration: A hybrid workspace allows employees to communicate both through virtual channels and face-to-face simultaneously. You can discuss matters via video calls or documentations. The entire “onsite” team can sit together in a meeting room and meet their remote employees for a discussion. If business workflow demands, the remote team members can also visit their office location.
Emergency Situation: A hybrid working culture gives the advantage to employers to cope with certain emergency satiations like natural calamity, war, virus outbreak, or medical emergency. This step ensures business continuity in each case and keeps your employees safe.
Another point to note for this blended work environment is that a majority of workplace success depends on millennials. They cover almost 35% of the total workforce and this number will upsurge in the coming year. They prefer work-from-home and job flexibility rather than the traditional 9–6 work window.
What are the major bottlenecks of hybrid work culture and how to overcome them?
Team collaboration
Remote employees may feel left out in terms of company culture when working in such a blended work environment. In this case, the management team can make a rotational visit option for every employee who is remotely working from their own location. This strategy works to build strong group dynamics and ensure that there is good rapport amongst employees. Choosing the right virtual communication channel is also important to collaborate with employees who are working from different locations.
A need for strong strategic approach to lead teams
Strategic approach in this case involves tracking productivity and compiling work for remote employees properly. For a successful management approach, team co-ordination and productivity monitoring should be your top-most priority. To keep this in place, a common monitoring and collaboration platform is required that has report management platform.
It is even more important when your business operates under a hybrid team culture.
Remote operation or a hybrid team: Which one is best for your company?
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, employees round the world were forced to settle into their home. Breaking government norms of social gathering was dangerous for the entire workforce. This is why companies are adopting a hybrid workspace strategy, where the number of in-physical present staff can be customized.
When it’s about remote vs. hybrid working cultures; fully remote work comes with great flexibility. Although physical presence might be required for tasks like orientations, team-building, and project kick-offs. Looking at the current pandemic situation, it’s not necessary for a particular person to visit the office on a regular basis. Rotational shifts are a new go-to strategy. Remote work will promote individual focus for an employee whereas other office days will ensure team-meetings to function efficiently. Employees in staggered groups will definitely solve the purpose of social distancing while simultaneously ensuring productivity monitoring and in-house employee engagement.
In fact, the majority of employees want to get back to their desk and to resume their office-social life. A survey report published by the Institute for Economic Policy Research of Stanford University showed that 55% of US workers want a mixture of home and office working. Another study conducted in the UK reveals that the employers expect the proportion of regular home workers to double, from 18% pre-pandemic to 37% post-pandemic.
When it comes on remote vs. hybrid working cultures, their pros and cons vary based on your type of business and your needs. However, both require a common platform where managing the entire workforce is easy, pro-active and secure.
Three major aspects of team management are –
A team monitoring software solution that covers all three major aspects of remote and hybrid workspace solves every difficulty of remote culture operation. Leapmax, as a remote working solution is developed to cover all three mentioned facets. For WFH culture to succeed; Leapmax ensures an effective performance review system that is fast and accurate to accomplish.
The answer is not about adopting a single workspace but decide based on business requirements and technical capacity. Only then, a business can choose the right workspace for its continuity and prosperity.
To know more about every smart feature of Leapmax and to evaluate employees based on output for both counterpart of your hybrid team, contact us.
