Employee-centered workplaces, is hybrid office a "flash in the pan" or a "general trend"

The COVID-19 pandemic that has swept the globe has changed the way many people live, some temporarily and some long-term. One of the most significant long-term changes in the way you work is that there are already a number of companies around the world that have made mixed work the norm. In fact, the simple remote work model existed before the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, and most of these companies are internet companies that focus on technology. Some of the world's leading high-tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., have gradually normalized and institutionalized the mixed office, requiring only employees to come to the company for 1-3 days a week, and even some companies have extended this cycle to a month. So, what exactly is "mixed work" in the sense?

With more than 175,000 employees in 74 countries, Microsoft faced enormous staff challenges at the start of COVID-19, and the office model was largely shifted to telecommuting. From making connections in virtual environments to struggling to keep up with rapidly changing employee needs, Microsoft's human resource managers have struggled to cope with the changes that can occur in most employees' careers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a LinkedIn post: "Hybrid work represents the biggest shift in the way our generation works. According to his research, Nadella said the vast majority of employees say they want more flexible remote work options, employee expectations are changing, and we will need to be more inclusive, collaborative, learning and motivated to drive the career development of each employee, which needs to be achieved through "flexibility in when, where and how people work."

Mixed working has become the new management normal, the biggest change in the labor system since the forty-hour workday nearly a hundred years ago, and will have a profound impact on society and the economy. China, as a labor powerhouse and an Internet power, also needs to face this change head-on. Affected by the spring epidemic, some first-tier cities on the mainland, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, are facing huge labor population distribution and personnel control, and many companies have to choose to work from home again. It also gives us the opportunity to think more directly about how to build a hybrid work team and develop it into a new normal, whether working remotely or in the office, managers need more time to consider the work needs of each employee. Ctrip Group took the lead in promoting the "3+2" hybrid office model in most departments of the company, and Ctrip announced that the company will start implementing a mixed office system, allowing employees to choose to work remotely for 1-2 days a week on Wednesdays and Fridays. This is the first major company in China to introduce a "3+2" hybrid working system for most employees. Prior to this, Ctrip had conducted experiments in two R&D departments and achieved good results. Productivity has not been affected, and employee satisfaction has increased dramatically, with a significant reduction in employee turnover by a third. It is not difficult to see that more domestic enterprises have also begun to explore the model of mixed work.

The hybrid work model allows employees to have the freedom between telecommuting and working in the field, depending on their personal preferences and work goals. As a result, not every employee in this environment has the same arrangement within their company. The idea behind mixed work is that different employees, even employees of the same team, can work together in the same space, as long as they are provided with the appropriate equipment and tools.

Here are 3 flexible working arrangements that ViewSonic, the world's leading video provider, recommends is considered by the company:

Telecommuting

Telecommuting means employees are working off-site, whether at home, in a coffee shop, in a library, or anywhere wi-Fi is accessible, depending on employer's policies.

This arrangement can be entirely remote — which is why it is often erroneously labeled "remote work" — but sometimes telecommuting employees may be asked to return to the site for a meeting or information exchange meeting. Therefore, telecommuting refers to employees who work remotely, but can also return to the office as needed.

Employers don't specify where telecommuting employees work, but they may need to provide technical assistance, such as access, so that employees can have the equipment they need to get the job done. Employees can also choose whether to telecommute each weekday or only a specific number of days per week.

There are a number of difficulties that employers and employees must consider when working remotely, including:

• Reducing office catch-up can affect team communication and collaboration
• Giving priority to workers on site can have a negative impact on career development
• Distractions outside the office, such as pets, children, and other people in the home
• Since both take up the same space, the distinction between home and work-life balance is reduced.
• Increase expectations of employees outside of normal business hours

Work remotely

Similar to telecommuting, remote work allows employees to work off-site from any location using accessible Wi-Fi and the technical equipment needed to stay connected to the company. A key difference, however, is that remote workers (usually) never need to enter the workplace. In this way, remote staff can be recruited from all over the place, without strict geographical restrictions.

Some companies are even moving to a fully distributed model or working remotely, where they no longer have a central office location. A prime example of this is The company behind WordPress (a content management system) is Automattic, a company that chose to close its San Francisco headquarters because all employees are now remote.

There are many benefits to both employers and employees adopting remote work. Remote work has been shown to encourage increased productivity, flexibility and cost savings, and reduces the carbon footprint by eliminating commuting. It has also become an increasingly viable long-term option for more employees. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, nearly 40 percent of U.S. full-time employees can effectively complete work from home.

Remote work also brings huge benefits to talent acquisition and recruitment efforts, as there are no geographical boundaries to the pool of potential candidates. Now, companies can hire the people who best fit their teams, regardless of their city or even country.

Remote workers may also be allowed to use their own devices, such as laptops, but many industries need enhanced security measures to protect people and data. In these cases, companies need to strengthen the construction of IT and network data security, provide the necessary equipment and guidelines, so that remote workers can do the work correctly.

Whether working remotely or remotely, collaborative communication is an essential and critical step, so how to work effectively as a team, best-selling Author Erica Dhawan of Connected Times and Chair of Business Psychology Professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (Thomas Camolo Premzic; There are some rules of thumb for communicating with remote teams:

Elastic time

The flexible work model allows employees to choose when their work days start and end – as long as the core number of hours they work hasn't changed.

Since flexible working hours do not affect the total time of work, the main benefit is that it allows employees to freely choose when to work. This could mean employees opting for 10 a.m. 7 instead of the traditional 9-to-5 a.m. As long as employees clearly communicate their preferred flexible working schedule, this work model can be effectively integrated into the company's policies.

Flexible workers often don't work at traditional times, which can benefit those who need more work/life balance to adjust their schedules based on other factors, such as school, childcare, or commute time. Similarly, some employees work best outside of traditional working hours. According to survey data, 60 percent of flexible workers say they are more productive and engaged in flexible time settings than in the office.

Hybrid workplaces reap huge benefits from two work scenarios: remote and on-site. However, organizations may encounter difficulties in transitioning to a hybrid work model if they do not consider the potential challenges that come with it.

The most common challenges associated with blended work can be grouped into the "5Cs": communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture. You can start by understanding these five challenges to assess your current situation and the direction from there. It is designed to help leaders solve and rank the most common challenges in hybrid work.

Communication

It's clear that the reliance on technology presents fundamental communication challenges. When we first transitioned to fully remote work in March 2020, many of us had to overcome technical difficulties, but the transition to hybrid work can also be difficult. One executive once said that when their employees started coming back to the office, they realized that their video conferencing system wasn't fully equipped for the needs of mixed work — if they even remembered how to do it. In addition, there are other practical difficulties in mixed work. For example, if some people are working remotely, should everyone in the office log in from a different computer to level the playing field? Or does this create more problems than it solves?

In addition to the technical challenges, communication in remote and mixed teams can be complex, and some people are more comfortable on screen than others – this is a working setup that in addition to power, status, and language differences have created communication barriers.

Coordination

All collaborative work involves coordination, but working in a hybrid team presents more coordination challenges than working face-to-face. The risk is that what researchers call "fault lines" can easily arise between people who work face-to-face and those who work remotely. Because of the extra effort required to coordinate with remote teammates, they are excluded from the small exchanges and small decisions made by those who work together in the office. Over time, when people get used to who's in the circle and who's not in the circle, they're left out of more important conversations and more important decisions.

Connection

The challenges of connectivity are not limited to technical communication and logistical coordination. A bigger problem is social relationships, which can be threatened or disappear altogether when working remotely. We know that career networks and mentoring relationships are important for development in the workplace, and building and maintaining these relationships is particularly challenging for women and minorities. We also know from research that relationships are socially sustainable and important to our mental health. Mixing work risks creates a "ruling class" of people who feel they are at the heart of the organization, firmly committed to those feelings of the "lower classes" and disconnected peripherals not only work, but also create meaning from social life and bond employees to work more closely with the organization. The result of this could be that employees are less happy and less loyal, and they are more likely to go elsewhere looking for opportunities.

Creativity

Both types of creativity are threatened by mixed work. Perhaps the most obvious one is collective creativity: people can brainstorm by scaling, but programming time and formatting generate ideas that most likely can't justify more liquids like productive conversations, and unexpected things can happen when we work together with others to produce different perspectives or work together to solve problems.

But individual creativity can also be threatened. We know that quiet alone time can help people generate new ideas and insights. However, for employees who must constantly create or innovate, it is unclear whether days or weeks of individual work will prove to be productive. Instead, it's reasonable to think that at least some social interaction and spontaneous conversation with colleagues, seeing random artifacts in each other's cubicles, and even landscape changes from home to work location may be important for creativity.

Culture

Like creativity, it's a challenge for senior leaders to be increasingly concerned about bringing everyone back to the office during the pandemic and the prospects for bringing everyone back to the office are getting dimmer and dimmer. In the first few days, months of remote work, the company's relief at how employees produced and participated seemed to remain. But that may be largely due to the fact that these employees all worked closely together before the pandemic, knew how to do it effectively, and in addition, they also understood the company's norms, values, and expectations. Now, with existing employees leaving and new employees joining, an increasingly pressing challenge is how to socialize with these new employees and integrate them into the culture of the company, whether they are interns, novices or experienced executives.

In addition, corporate culture is critical to demonstrating the uniqueness of an organization to potential new employees, especially in a highly competitive company industry such as technology, consulting, or banking. If employees never or rarely come to the office, or rarely stay together, how do you maintain a company's unique "feel"? So, how can companies stand out in the battle for talent?

While recognizing the importance of culture to new hires, we shouldn't lose sight of the reality that maintaining a positive culture and strong organizational commitment is at least just as important for many companies that aren't new hires. Over the past two years, employees have often found themselves overwhelmed by a variety of demands and pressures, while the company culture has not fully recognized their struggles or supported their needs. But even those who manage their day-to-day work well may find themselves increasingly alienated and alienated from the company, amplifying the risk of reduced motivation, reduced organizational commitment, and increased turnover.

Research in the Harvard Business Review shows that a lack of intimacy inhibits the formation of trust, connection, and common purpose, three essential elements of a healthy team.

The world turned to remote work overnight, and now we're thinking about what the future of work should be. The dramatic changes and mindset changes around work and life are real, and the decision to go back to the office, mixed office, or work entirely remotely is complex. There is no doubt that most economies will switch to remote work in 2020, which will have a lasting impact on the world's "remote work experiment". But what is certain is that the digitization of work will continue to exist.

While the pace of this change has challenged human resources as never before, it has also brought many lessons. From making connections in virtual environments to struggling to keep up with rapidly changing employee needs, HR professionals have been grappling with the "biggest changes" that can occur in most employees' careers.

This requires managers to pay more attention to the role of employees in the organization, motivate and empower employees. The challenges of building a hybrid workplace are knowledge management, collaboration, innovation and empowerment.

The future of hybrid work means that employees will have more adaptability and independence, and employees want to complete their work in more flexible times and places to improve their own expectations and completion of the work. Working remotely requires more secure and reliable links, including basic office software and management controls. These must be independent of any workplace in order to work anytime, anywhere. In today's environment, how do we define whether the transition from traditional to hybrid has been completed?

• Achieve the consistency of remote work, regardless of the workplace, can be achieved through a series of digital means to improve employee productivity;
• Agility that is not related to the workplace, ensuring that information and processes are communicated flat, so as to promote the construction of a hybrid office culture;
• The necessary on-site office, the continuity of the business has not been achieved, and the on-site office model is indispensable, which requires enterprises to provide employees with a safer workplace and maintain a high degree of concentration of work;

Clarity and consistency is the key to mixed office, the establishment of a set of specifications suitable for remote work to help avoid confusion in the work process, the content can include but not limited to: work response time, delivery time, standardized execution process, etc.; secondly, the organization's top-to-bottom information transmission must be clear and clear, put an end to the assumption that all employees understand the simple expression of work, and finally find effective team incentives to enhance the relationship between team members and strengthen the concept of collaboration, Even if it's just a transition from simple written notifications to video celebrations, promoting empathy among team members, the challenges that exist with telecommuting will never go away, but creating rules, cultures, and protocols that have always been there will go a long way toward building new combinations of communication skills.

In fact, Microsoft has gleaned lessons from the shift in hybrid work models:

1. Strong culture counteracts chaos:

Microsoft has been changing its culture for more than six years— and during the pandemic, this work has proven crucial. "Culture is being tested in a crisis," and over the past year and a half, three aspects of Microsoft's culture have become "guiding lights": it operates as a "Microsoft team," prioritizes diversity and inclusion, and puts customers first. In the latter case, for example, when retail stores had to close in the early days of the pandemic, Microsoft created an emergency remote model that enabled 80 percent of retail employees to provide virtual training to customers — meeting customer needs while keeping employees on a normal payroll.

2. Employee benefits have a new meaning:

HR leaders have always understood the value of taking care of employee benefits, but have long struggled to address this issue – especially during the pandemic when business leaders no longer deny the value of prioritizing employee benefits. While many employers are seeing increased productivity, workers are taking fewer days off, working outside of normal working hours and suffering from burnout and stress. To solve this problem, Microsoft first modified its message, renaming its "sick leave" to "sick leave and mental health time." Leaders also gain new insights into many aspects of happiness—emotional, physical, financial, and psychological. They provide discussion guides that teach managers how to talk to them about these different areas and expanded benefits.

3. Straightpoint managers are important

Microsoft employs about 22,000 managers who have become even more important during the pandemic. In particular, the organization relied on its managers to help adapt to the 25,000 new employees it had brought in since the beginning of the pandemic, and found that new employees relied on on-the-job assistance from their managers for a 20 percent increase during that period. And those with managers who are actively involved in the process are three times more likely to be satisfied with their onboarding. “

4. Listening and Communicating:

At Microsoft, leaders noticed that once the pandemic began, employees more than doubled the amount of time they spent in meetings, and the number of chats sent after typical office hours skyrocketed. Recognizing a problem, leaders turned to technology to gauge employee sentiment toward work/life balance and other topics — providing opportunities for all employees to provide feedback during the company's town hall and creating a corporate channel dedicated to answering employees' questions about the pandemic. Importantly, leaders also shared data and insights about employee needs with managers.

5. Flexibility has many aspects:

Before COVID-19, Microsoft allowed occasional flexible working hours and working from home, but flexibility was not yet part of its core culture. Leaders now understand that flexibility needs to be highly personalized, based on the needs of each employee – which means managers and leaders need to have a deep understanding of what aspects of flexibility are important to their employees. "Flexibility is multifaceted, personal, and will continue to evolve – now is a great opportunity to continue that momentum."

6. Building social capital requires creativity:

Having a strong network at work affects productivity, innovation and inclusion, and other opportunities. But relationships that were previously cultivated through corridor conversations, around the water dispenser, or business trips now have to be built virtually in remote and many hybrid environments, which can be more challenging. Employers need to be more conscious in helping employees make these connections. For example, encourage managers to allocate a few minutes of time at the beginning of a meeting for casual conversations and to work with employees about their lives, not just their work.

7. Inclusion is essential:

The pandemic is a wake-up call to long-standing inclusion issues for remote workers: workplace challenges, broadband disruptions, complications of care – prompting many employers to finally address these barriers. It's also an opportunity to make teams more inclusive, especially when employees can see each other's family lives, pets, partners, and more. In a recent employee survey, nearly 40 percent of Microsoft employees said they were more inclined to be authentic at work since the pandemic began.

8. Technology is the link:

The digital employee experience is just as important as the hands-on experience. However, because employers use too many digital solutions, it is often decentralized. As mixing becomes the norm, employers will need to think more carefully about many aspects of the digital employee experience – connection, collaboration, inclusion, learning, purpose, and culture.

9. The conditions under which the person decides himself:

As the big resignations continue, employers are grappling with new expectations from their employees, and this trend will continue. The study found that more than 40 percent of employees surveyed plan to leave next year due to burnout and lack of flexibility. Employers need to pay special attention to exactly who will leave: Millennials, for example, have seen more than 275 percent increase in job changes over the past two years.

Objectively, by opting for a hybrid work model, companies can take advantage of remote and on-site advantages to provide employees with greater flexibility and benefits. The advantages of a more flexible work environment can greatly improve employee morale, increase sustainability and increase employee retention.

In fact, the survey showed that 59% of respondents believe they are more productive when working from home, and 32% say they are significantly more productive.

However, finding the right balance in a mixed model does require management to follow best practices when dealing with flexible work schedule transitions. Even with office work as an option for mixed employees, businesses must maintain empathy and up-to-date communication with all employees to help them stay connected.

This means that although there may be distances between colleagues, there must be tools and resources available to connect employees. Email, monitors, and video conferencing are all necessary for employee check-in and collaboration.

Real workplaces will not disappear completely, even the largest enterprises will not completely abandon their office facilities, because this is enough to form part of the company's culture and external brand image, such as Apple, Amazon, the key point is that if you create a mixed working environment, it means that you need to do both office and remote work, which requires managers to accept the remote priority office thinking mode. This is where telecommuting, which is often discussed, is more than just the simple scaling and application of digital tools. These digital tools are really simple to use, but they can only be better served by designing them to fit the company's realities.

In addition to creating a digitally supportive environment, employers can take steps to improve how employees feel in a hybrid workplace through a well-thought-out investment in technology and resources. Encourage employees. Resting and respecting their work/life balance is essential, but not always feasible in a daily work arrangement. Choose displays and devices that can reduce eye strain through ergonomics and blue light filters to ensure employees can work efficiently and safely.

The value of the hybrid office model for businesses and employees is that it can reduce commuting costs and increase employee satisfaction and loyalty without compromising efficiency. The hybrid work model also allows employees to spend more flexibly time for family life and leisure travel. From the perspective of social effects, the promotion of mixed office not only reduces traffic congestion, but also benefits environmental protection, women's career development and increases fertility; the popularity of mixed office is also conducive to reducing the distance between cities and suburbs, large cities and small cities, and countries. In addition, the popularity of the mixed office model will reduce the demand for office buildings in large cities, and the residential demand in the suburbs of large cities and small cities around large cities will increase significantly, which is conducive to alleviating the high housing prices in large cities.

Mixed office will gradually become an important trend in the future development, with the infiltration of the meta-universe concept, mixed office will also become the daily working mode of more non-technical companies, but whether full remote work is feasible is still debatable.