How hybrid work scheduling is increasing productivity and employee happiness in modern companies?
Hybrid, multi-location work has given employees a new level of freedom but also introduced a new set of challenges for organisations, teams and individuals. Since people are self-driven, selecting the place to work is done typically independently by colleagues. This creates a challenge in most organisations as employees’ onsite and remote days are often different of those of close colleagues. Not seeing each other weekly on a regular basis has made many book internal Microsoft Teams calls to keep information and progress shared between colleagues. These checkup meetings end up filling the already full calendars.
Many organisations have tried to solve this challenge with workforce planning and team work scheduling aka giving fixed days for different teams to meet at the office. By applying generic rules across organisation and setting rigid working practises from top down employer takes away a lot of the benefits of the hybrid working. What interviews with high performing growth companies and with workplace consultancies indicate is that the work scheduling should start from the individual employee and be a shared activity between team members. This engages teams to plan ahead and make compromises in order to achieve common goal: be together when it brings the most value for the team and then being remote when that drives productivity of each of the team members.
hybrid work scheduling helps employees’ performance and focus
By planning work location for each day of the week, employees are more focused on advancing tasks that benefit from onsite work with colleagues or that they can do whilst working remotely. Many employees struggle with the hectic nature of hybrid working where context switching is often present. By planning work locations for each day of the week employees gain clarity on when tasks could be done in the most productive way possible. Some tasks require collaboration with colleagues, often resulting best results when worked on with everyone present, thus being ideal for onsite office days. Some other tasks require focus and time making them ideal for those days when the whole team is working remotely.
hybrid work scheduling increases collaboration and office usage
Sharing one’s Working location Schedule (A Week Plan) with close colleagues gives social reasons for them to join each other for office days. This synchronisation also helps them work remotely on the same days to achieve increased focus and performance. Since top reason to visit the office is typically close colleagues, by providing easy way to share week plans between colleagues you introduce lower barrier and increased motivation to
A) Visit the office more often
B) Synchronise office visits and remote days inside teams and between close colleagues
This creases a positive feedback loop that typically increases volunteer office attendance around 25%.
Manage office hot desk capacity via hybrid work scheduling and week plans
Optimising office space utilisation and efficiency via shared desk policy can be a big change for the worse for employees unless managed properly. Typically team leads worry about lack dedicated desks for their team to facilitate team days. Individual employees worry whether they will find suitable seating when the arrive to the office. To address these issues it is important to make office capacity visible for the employees and make it easy for teams to use shared areas for team days and for working close to each other.
hybrid work scheduling improves sustainability by reducing waste
When week plans are used across the organisation it automatically balances the highest peaks allowing a reduction of the office floor area. Additionally, a hybrid work scheduling creates predictable office usage up to two weeks in advance, allowing for the optimisation of cleaning and restaurant services. This can help reduce waste and carbon footprint of the workplace significantly. With hybrid work scheduling organisations can also share more easily underutilised capacity from their office with other companies in a flexible way. This will both decrease the carbon footprint of the office but can also allow other social synergies such as improved collaboration of two companies or increased employee happiness.
More information about how hybrid work scheduling
Read related blog posts
Case studies
Discuss the topic with Hybrid Workplace expert
Read more about Steerpath Hybrid Workplace app