Employee experience

Remote and hybrid work for many employees—and employers—are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Often, we speak about post-pandemic outlook on business and new objectives, but it’s our new ‘normal’. The COVID is now a demarcation line in all our lives that had largescale rippling effects we are still coming to grips with.

As such, working through swinging focus to enhance employee experience in hybrid work environment is a particular is important. The hybrid model is a special circumstance where culture both in the office and at home effect the employee’s experience with your organization. Let’s look at how you can enhance employee experience within a hybrid work environment.

What is a Hybrid Work Environment?

Seems like an odd question, but there isn’t a die-hard definition of the hybrid work environment. It can mean an employee goes into the office once or so a week, spends half their work week there, or maybe just has the option of heading into the office when they want to.

To be clear, hybrid work isn’t new. Neither is remote work. It has simply gained more traction with the pandemic. As long as an employee has access to office and home workspace to spend time then you can consider that employee hybrid when that’s part of their role. In a more recognizable phrase, it’s ‘flex working’.

To understand the importance, according to a poll from World Economic Forum, 75% of workers want to be at least hybrid or have flexibility in their work arrangements.

Prioritizing Employee Experience in Hybrid Workplace

It’s important to prioritize employee experience in any organization—as important as focusing on customer experience. It particularly, however, is paramount when it comes to hybrid space. As employee call for more hybrid and remote options, there is something to understand inherently from this request in two parts: 1) work-life balance focus and 2) the need for comfort and being present for life.

The Pandemic highlighted an integral need for employees to feel fulfilled and like their life isn’t passing them by. They are willing to—as we saw with the Great Resignation—to leave well paying positions to claim that freedom. As in customer experiences where product differentiation has given way to experience differentiation, so too has employee experience made that shift.

Creating comfortable, flexible, and open-option workspaces can lead to the difference between retaining an excellent employee or losing them.

Benefits of enhancing employee experience in hybrid workspaces:

1. Minimizing operational costs – allowing this flexibility can lower overhead costs from maintaining office space, passing on those savings for better compensation packages and investment into employees.
2. Productivity increases – by working where their most comfortable (be it home or the office on any given day), companies can see increases in overall productivity and efficiency. Flexible work schedules can optimize this and allow the employee to choose the times they are most productive to work.
3. Burnout fighter – inherently, hybrid work is a great answer to waylaying burnout before it can begin. Employees are allowed the freedom to operate from a space that is conducive to their well-being, something that is integral to stopping employee burnout and exodus.
4. Collaboration and teambuilding – hybrid, by nature, inspires greater collaboration between coworkers both laterally and vertically in the organizational chart. This sense of working together is psychologically better, as we saw coming out of the pandemic.
5. Feedback access – many people are more comfortable sharing candid feedback when there is a level of anonymity, or they don’t feel like their work environment could become hostile due to their concerns. Also, the ability to have a buffer of technology instead of in-person conversation can also lead to more factual data from employees.

Digital Employee Experience

The digital employee experience is leading in hybrid environments because half if not more of the employee work week is done digitally. This is thinking about meetings, interfaces, integrations with programs like Team or Slack, email providers, and more to allow employees to work the best they can.

You can see from this why the digital experience is important. It is an extension of your in-office corporate culture. Digital employee experience is where interactions between employees and their organization is made possible by technologies the company uses.

Organization should focus on these items to increase success:

1. Inclusivity – no matter if your employee is at work or at home, they should feel part of the team and decision meaning. Make sure hybrid employees have a seamless transition from home to the office for the best experience.
2. Integrations – using systems that integrate with applications for efficient processes can make at-home work feel like in-office functionality. Through this, employees gain the comfortability of home environment while also staying in the loop.
3. Powerful technology – your software and technology should be robust, agile, and efficient to handle your needs. Your technology, automation, machine learning, and software should compliment hybrid, remote, and in-office work in such a manner that they appear the same for the best outcome.

Digital employee experience will drive employee experience in-house, while also change business strategies to a more adaptable space. Leveraging digital employee experience will drive greater overall employee experience when handled correctly.

Workspace Optimization and Security

Of course, one must speak about optimization and security when you think of hybrid or remote work. Technology and software must be feared to protect safe data, company files, sensitive information and more. There can be a struggle from an IT perspective to ensure data security when working from home, so companies should prepare equipment, software, guidelines, and procedures to take the load off employees as much as possible in return for greater productivity and efficiency.

Training for Hybrid Work

No matter who you are, training should also be part of the onboarding process when it comes to hybrid work. It isn’t simply having a home office. Security, access, equipment, and much more go into optimizing a home space. Companies should make sure that employees—no matter the title—are prepared for hybrid work.

Things to be careful of:

1. Losing sight of work hours – it can be easy to not entirely clock out or have managers expecting response and action outside of work hours. This is counterintuitive to the hybrid business model built on employee-first experiences and efficiency.
2. Lack of organizational understanding – part of the first point but extended into employers not understanding specific care that goes into hybrid employees. They can’t be left behind from an “out of sight, out of mind” perspective. Company-wide adherence to the new model and procedures helps with missing this.
3. Outdated systems/procedures – as tech is important to the digital employee experience in hybrid workspaces, using outdated systems, policies, or procedures will bottleneck strategies and implementation. If your company is making the change to hybrid work, plan it out and work on strategies from every aspect to combat potential pitfalls.
4. Blind spots – many companies can miss the mark on what their employees need to be successful at home because they only think of organizational needs from the employer perspective. Taking in feedback from employees—from onboarding to exit interview—can be vital to put out fires before they flare out of control. Continuously close the look and reexamine strategies as goals are met or changes need to be made.

Final Thoughts

The future of work has long been a focus the last few years from a federal level. This changing work environment necessitates changes in organizational structure and strategies to stay ahead. The more flexible the workforce—and the organizations who hire them—the better staying power and retention they have. In some ways, you can look at hybrid work as a step to better processes and procedures for entirely remote work. You can lay the foundation sooner than later to satisfy employee needs while also setting your company up for success in the future.

Kenneth

Kenneth is a proud native of sydney, born and raised there. However, he pursued his education abroad and studied in Australia. Kenneth has worked as a journalist for almost a decade, making valuable contributions to prominent publications such as Yahoo News and The Verge. Currently, he serves as a journalist for The Hear Up, where he focuses on covering climate and science news. You can reach Kenneth at [email protected].