In 2023, 50% of remote-capable employees are working in a hybrid capacity. Another 30% are fully remote and only 20% are on site full time. And yet, 90% of remote-capable employees prefer flexible schedules.
Many organizations are recognizing this trend as an important factor in employee satisfaction and retention.
But despite its proven viability, business leaders are often left with one big, burning question:
How do you actually implement hybrid scheduling?
To help answer that question, we’ve mapped out some of the best strategies, tips, and tools that can help you effectively implement and manage this model.
The Tangible Elements: Tools and Tips for Managing Hybrid Work Schedules
Leading your team to thrive in a hybrid work environment requires a mix of tangible elements—how you’ll do it—and as well as some less tangible (yet equally valuable) considerations like maintaining your company culture.
We’ll start with the tangibles.
4 Facets of a Successful Hybrid Work Strategy
As a leader, you need to be strategic and intentional about how you’ll roll out and manage your hybrid work scenario.
1. Set the Right Policies
It’s important to set the right policies from the start. This includes policies around:
- Expectations for in-office and at-home days
- How to book and/or share workspace
- Technology requirements and policies for working at home
- Mandatory work hours, including time zone differences
- Online availability
- Flexibility for handling personal tasks during work hours
These should all be formalized in a clear policy document that’s circulated with new and current employees. When newly implemented, communicate this to your team in a meeting and address any immediate questions, comments, or concerns on the spot.
Then, make sure your team feels confident reaching out with any others that might come to mind down the line.
Depending on the size and nature of your team, you may also wish to include your employees in developing these policies. At a minimum, ask for feedback and be responsive to any challenges that come up.
You can review our guide to creating a work-from-home policy to learn more about this process.
2. Hire and Train Effectively
Prospective and new employees should be informed about all remote or hybrid work policies. This involves ensuring that you:
- Communicate high-level details of your policies in your job descriptions and throughout the hiring process. Prospective employees should know what they are signing up for and what’s expected of them in the role.
- Train and onboard new employees on the policies, explaining details about how the system works and everything they need to know to do their jobs.
3. Incorporate Check-Ins and Feedback
It’s always important to check-in with employees, but it’s even more so during times of transition. As you roll out any hybrid schedule policy updates, make space for employee check-ins and feedback sessions.
The goal here is to:
- Clarify policies and procedures
- Create space for questions or challenges
- Address employee concerns
- Support employee productivity and workplace goals
- Generate buy-in for hybrid work policies that support organization goals
4. Refine Your Policies
As you hear from employees, try things out, or evaluate what’s working or not, refine your policies.
This is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor.
Like any business strategy, you need to regularly review your hybrid work setup to ensure it’s meeting business goals and helping your company or organization thrive.
However, ensure you’re not making changes too quickly. Policies around work hours or expectations to work in-office impact people’s personal lives and they may not be able to quickly change childcare, transportation, or other factors to accommodate a different schedule. So, consider things carefully and ensure your changes are aligned with your entire team’s needs.
3 Ways to Optimize Tools for Effective Hybrid Team Management
When you’ve developed strategies and policies for hybrid work, you can then look at specific tools to help manage things. Here are some areas to look into:
1. Scheduling Platforms
We created a guide to creating a hybrid work schedule, which is a useful starting place to understand creating a shiftwork schedule.
To have an effective hybrid schedule where employees are in and out of the office, you need to keep track of things with an effective scheduling platform. Eden, Kadence, and Envoy all offer desk-booking, room-booking, and visitor-tracking capabilities for you to keep track of who’s in the office.
2. Collaboration and Communication Tools
Finding the right tools depends on your team’s unique needs and goals. You can view our guide about tools for managing a hybrid or remote team, where we’ve broken it down into these categories to think about:
- Communication: These tools help you communicate better as a team. Popular options include Slack for messaging, Calendly for coordinating meetings, and Loom for pre-recording explainer videos.
- Time management: This category of tools helps team members stay on track. Check out Hubstaff for time tracking and Todoist for task management.
- Project management: The goal with these tools is to streamline projects and ensure everyone is on the same page. Some effective tools include Asana, Trello, and Basecamp.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tools you can implement for your hybrid team. Ultimately, you might need to try a few things out to see what’s best.
3. Evaluation Programs
By allowing employees to work at home for at least part of the week, you’re instilling more trust and autonomy in their work. Since you can’t pop in and see what they’re up to or “look over their shoulder,” new performance management strategies are needed.
This starts with defining metrics and KPIs that are most valuable to your team. You can then consider using platforms like Tableau or Scoro—data management software that helps track KPIs and understand progress.
For a more personalized approach, ensure you’re discussing goal performance during both hybrid team meetings and individual check-ins.
The Essential Intangibles: Maintaining Culture, Communication, and Cohesion
With the strategies and tools in place, you can operate as a hybrid team. But to optimize your team’s performance and enjoyment, you need to also think of some intangible qualities—namely maintaining company culture, cohesion, and communication.
As employees are no longer in the office full-time, you lose some natural team and rapport-building. It takes more effort to build and maintain a strong company culture when employees are in and out of the office.
Here are two keys to doing it right:
1. Choose The Right Workspace
Ultimately, choosing the right workspace can make or break your team’s experience. We’ve previously explored the rise of remote and hybrid work and how flexible workspace has become a growing priority for businesses.
Since 100% of employees are not in the office 100% of the time, most businesses simply don’t need large traditional offices anymore. Instead, a flexible workspace like a coworking space offers the exact space you need, when you need it.
At The Launch, for example, you can have a private office or team suite that accommodates a portion of your team at a time, and then rotate people through the space as needed. If your needs change, you can easily scale up into a bigger space with our flexible contracts and terms.
This way, you can still bring your team together for meaningful in-person interaction without it breaking your bottom line.
Further, coworking spaces like The Launch offer all-inclusive pricing with amenities and services you need to run your business. This includes everything from fast Wi-Fi, printing, and reception services, to important in-person events, networking, and community-building opportunities.
2. Be Intentional With Time
Just as you want to be intentional with the space you choose to work from, your hybrid team will benefit when you’re also intentional with time.
Basically, you’ve got less time together, so you have to optimize it! This can be done by focusing on three areas:
- Leverage in-person meetings: Everyone might be on a different schedule, but prioritize in-person meetings with all key team members. This is an important time to bond and collaborate together.
- Have some fun: Get together outside of work with socials or events. This can be a team lunch, happy hour, or off-site event. Survey your team to see what they’re interested in and make it a priority to get to know each other outside the office (or Zoom).
- Optimize communication: As discussed earlier, it’s important to choose the right tools and platforms for your hybrid team to collaborate with. You can also set the precedent for open and honest communication, by building a safe environment as the leader.
Managing a hybrid team comes with new challenges to overcome. But alongside those challenges is an opportunity for increased productivity and employee satisfaction.
As hybrid teams remain the popular choice post-pandemic, it’s important for leaders to learn to lead them effectively. These strategies help leaders manage their hybrid teams to thrive at work.
If you’re in search of a flexible workspace that offers the tools and flexibility you need to operate a hybrid team, contact us today and book a tour of your nearest Launch Workplaces.