The United Kingdom is hoping to get rid of the pandemic-related lockdown and other restrictions. From January 27, all Plan B restrictions will be lifted in England. However, when it comes to people and their willingness to return to offices, not everyone is keen on it. So, how will the employee experience change in the hybrid working model?
What Is A Hybrid Working Model?
The Hybrid working model refers to an arrangement in which employees work from home and go to their offices on different workdays. Not all working days are spent working from home, neither are the workers expected to be in the office every morning.
Back in 2019, when work from home became a trend, businesses and offices realised that their employees were more productive and putting in more hours each day. In a study carried out by Great Place to Work, over 800,000 employees were monitored over the course of two years. During this study, the employees’ productivity between the months of March and August were compared in 2019 and 2020. When working from home, remote work productivity remained steady or rose.
However, research done by Monster reported that over 69% of the people who were working from home had already started to show symptoms of burnout by the end of 2020. The initial boost in productivity was gradually decreasing.
But working from home continues to have advantages nobody can deny. No cost of travelling, not needing to rent an office space and paying the hefty electricity bills to keep the offices warm were some big-range savings that companies were doing. Thus, organisations all over the world decided to draw a line in the middle and the hybrid working model was founded.
How Will Employee Experience Change In The Hybrid Working Model?
Every good company tries to provide its workers with the greatest possible working environment. But, especially now that employees aren’t always in the office, perfecting the employee experience is easier said than done. Each employee is distinct and has their own set of obstacles and concerns, which your firm may or may not be able to address. Plus, the fact that your team is no longer in the same location makes things more complicated.
Lee Ganly from Acora suggests that in 2022, many organisations will revisit IT-enabled business choices they postponed last year and will decide that change can no longer be deferred.
IT support often focuses on its ‘bread and butter,’ such as network connection, application performance, cybersecurity, or new employee onboarding, to mention a few. Of course, such areas are vital, but some teams are adapting and growing with the times by happily accepting initiatives that fall into the hazy realms of HR, internal communications, and tech support.
When it comes to using IT to enhance your employee experience, here’s how we can help:
Ask The Employees What They Need
When it comes to making improving the employee experience, the first step seems to be less complicated than many think it to be – simply ask the employees what they want and how they feel about their current scenario. One of the most efficient ways to do this is through surveys.
Our user sentiment survey consultation assists customers with the strategy, development, and execution of their user sentiment survey. If you don’t have any survey methodology but want to understand user experience, or if you have a type of user/customer satisfaction survey but it has a poor response rate, we’ve got you covered.
We have extensive expertise in building and executing customer satisfaction/user sentiment surveys for the purpose of collecting data on the user experience.
Assess Your Tools & Services
At Bright Horse, we believe that if we can correctly measure something, we can make it better, thus we’ve invested in developing assessment-based services to gauge the effectiveness of our clients’ tools and services.
To correctly measure against an independent scoring system such as the Capability Maturity Model, we employ a combination of questioning tactics and observations in each of our assessment services.
Know more about how our Assessment Services can help you improve your employee experience.
Automation
One of the biggest aspects of the hybrid working model will come from how capable a company is in ensuring a great digital employee experience to their workers. While we believe it is never too late to make improvements, taking the first step is crucial and it has to happen now. If you don’t have the right setup in place, rest assured that your most talented employees are already thinking about leaving you. We’d recommend taking that first step with Nexthink.
Nexthink is a market-leading management software that offers high-quality analytics, and enables IT support to provide proactive IT support to businesses, with a key focus on enhancing the Digital Employee Experience (DEX). The programme is ideal for increasing employee happiness and efficiency, as well as boosting the overall operation of the firm.
As we head into 2023, the hybrid work model seems to be here for the long-term. It certainly seems to be the opinion of many online outlets. Therefore, as our remote workforce increases in size, so does the need to support them in their experience from wherever they choose or need to work. Technology has assisted us greatly in this demand as we saw with video conferencing technology, but we also need to remain focused on our remote employees' ability to carry out their remote work seamlessly and with sense that they are connected with the company at large. This is how we support their wellbeing and productivity, and something that DEX tools like Nexthink are excellently poised to enable.
Our Nexthink-certified and experienced consultants will lead you through a systematic session designed to analyse your Nexthink environment and offer you a complete measurement report as well as a structured improvement or installation project.
Investing in the appropriate tools is critical to the automation and success of any contemporary organisation, so our team of professionals will make sure you get the most bang for your buck. If you're interested, see our Nexthink consultancy or managed services options. Alternatively you can contact us to discuss how we might support your organisation's employee experience needs, digital or otherwise.