Overcoming the Challenges of Running a Hybrid Workplace
If you’re an entrepreneur or business leader, there are many potential advantages of running a hybrid workplace. These include possible productivity and morale benefits, as well as the opportunity to recruit from both inside and outside your geographical location. However, there are also some significant challenges to overcome too.
By avoiding some of the common pitfalls and taking sensible precautions, you can ensure you’re running a successful and happy workplace, while having access to the best local and international talent.
Maintaining Cohesion and Culture
Creating and maintaining a cohesive workforce and getting all of your employees to buy into your company culture can be among the biggest challenges you may face when running a hybrid workplace. Employees who regularly attend your premises may find company culture easier to understand than those who primarily or exclusively work remotely.
You can get around some of these issues by ensuring all meetings are remote-friendly and by regularly checking in with remote employees. Team building exercises can help with both culture and cohesion and these challenges can also be aided by bringing as many remote employees as possible into the physical workplace at regular intervals.
Managing Access and Data Security
Data security is a major concern with a hybrid business, especially with people accessing systems from different devices, locations and networks. However, you also need to maintain access control in the workplace itself, ensuring sensitive on-site locations can only be accessed by those with the right credentials.
Use identity and access management tools for cybersecurity and don’t automatically trust any device. Smart locking systems can protect physical spaces better than traditional keys, while you can also allocate company devices to remote workers to ensure everyone is using a device that hasn’t been compromised during personal use.
Coordinating Schedules and Tasks
Finally, coordinating availability can be difficult, especially if you’re dealing with an international workforce. As a result, collaboration and spontaneous meetings might be challenging, which may hurt creativity.
Providing flexibility can be beneficial for employee morale, but you need to anchor this by setting some core work times where everyone needs to be present. This can help to facilitate real-time collaboration.
You should also implement systems that include availability indicators, so employees know when other workers can be reached. Combine this with high-quality task management and communications software, enabling progress on tasks to be easily updated and work to be continued by employees in different time zones, or on different schedules.