A global workforce sipping coffee in pajamas, conquering tasks from the comfort of their homes while seamlessly attending in-office meetings. The term is “hybrid working,” aiming for the fantasyland of having the company’s pulse in both the physical and virtual worlds.
Striking a balance? It’s like trying to dance gracefully on two different beats—challenging but not impossible. Welcome to the era where the office is wherever you make it!
In the meantime, however, remote work will cement its position as an emerging part of today’s workforce, and it’s undeniable. Numerous conversations between the organizations and their workforces about the future of embracing hybrid work environments might also often end up expressing the hope for “the best of both worlds”. While this is not an easy feat, the challenge is to have the company’s footprint – and its employees – in two distinct but interconnected environments.
Hybrid Work Model – What is It & What Makes it Different from Traditional Working Models?
The hybrid work model, as its name implies, empowers the workforce in an organization with the freedom to choose the workplace based on their own convenience – be it work from home or office.
On the other hand, there may also be a possibility wherein a batch of workforces can alternate to work remotely occasionally and occasionally come to the office.
As opposed to traditional work modes, and instead of focusing on the workplace location of the employees, hybrid workplaces (or more precisely Hybrid models) emphasize majorly on the quality of employees’ work, their output as well as comfort and safety.
What Are the Views on Embracing Hybrid Work Models?
Hybrid models are a contentious topic among various industry experts. The move is decried by some as being impractical or not sustainable, but a Stanford study found it to increase workforce productivity by 13%.
Organizations are just beginning to brainstorm and formulate the specifics of how to undertake a more permanent mix of remote and on-site working for all roles that don’t require physical presence on-site.
According to a McKinsey report based on a survey of 100 executives from different industries and geographies, approximately nine out of ten organizations anticipate combining remote and on-site working in the future.
Although nine out of ten executives believe that hybrid models will become more prevalent, many are unable to envision how the transition will be made-and over a third of these executives indicate that their organizations lack alignment on a high-level vision. One-third of organizations have a comprehensive vision, but only one out of ten have put that vision into action.
Is the Hybrid Model Strategy Worth It?
Numerous organizations often look for ways to eliminate excess office space and utility expenses to achieve cost savings. To better understand this strategy’s worth, consider the following analysis as a step by step guide template, evaluating both cost-saving measures and productivity impacts.. Although these might seem like compelling reasons for organizations to offer employees off-site work options, they aren’t counted among the most important ones.
According to surveys that have examined the impact of hybrid work cultures, companies have benefited greatly from changing work cultures. We will examine some of the benefits of switching to hybrid work culture below.
1. Reduction in costs:
In cases where a greater percentage of the workforce in an organization opts to work remotely, the maintenance and operation of a physical office will shrink by a considerable amount only to the extent of limited workforces opting to work in the traditional office. Organizations may also opt to downsize their offices’ infrastructure with limited workforce capacity to only those limited preset number of employees provisioned to choose the option of working from the office and save considerably on rent.
It is even estimated that the number of office supplies like stationery, snacks, and drinking water will be reduced drastically, saving a huge chunk in revenue expenditure figures. Organizations will also be saved with the additional expenditure of buying new devices and deploying them among workforces for chronological task execution for the ones who opt to work from home if the organization enables the motion of Bring-your-own-devices (BYOD). With the saved funds, organizations can invest in and fulfill the long-awaited demands for the procurement of new devices and the purchase of the latest technologies.
Read more: https://blog.scalefusion.com/how-byod-drives-business-agility/
2. Enhanced productivity – courtesy of the right technology:
There is a higher likelihood that meeting rooms and office environments will provide better technology to facilitate team collaboration than the average home office. Mostly, traditional office environments are equipped with technologies facilitating video conferencing possibilities, tools for decent audio and video abilities, and an IT department to assist the workforces to troubleshoot the concerns as and when required.
The tech situation at remote working can be frustrating: oftentimes, remote workers have laptops with webcams and limited audio drivers, resulting in low-quality video calls with limited functionality compared to traditional office meeting settings with no IT team at standby.
With the utilization of a hybrid working model, employees may maximize the value of their office days by using the best tech capabilities at work for vital customer calls, meeting with the board about important decisions, or – why not? The team can even brainstorm together. This thereby makes it imperative for them to deliver the best output possible, hence boosting productivity and company profits.
3. Enhanced employer-employee relationship
Trust between employers, managers, and employees within an organization is an essential (and difficult to achieve) characteristic of a healthy, productive work environment. When employees opt to work remotely, hybrid work models enable them to prove to their managers that they are just as productive when they invest their time and brainstorm in the office, without leaving a sense of judgment in between.
As per the latest employee engagement research, 81 percent of employees say that trust in leaders is the most important factor in employee engagement, followed by the relationship an employee has with their supervisor right away.
By the way, you can create an employee handbook that would work as a “corporative Bible” and contain all written rules of “employer-employee” relationships. It helps employees follow the rules and be aware of their flexible work model standards.
Flexible work models also improve peers’ loyalty to a great extent by empowering the employees to be transparent and open with the freedom to complete their tasks and collaborate with their respective teams at their own pace. Employees will also feel more at peace if they’re given the freedom to balance personal tasks and errands they may need to run during work hours rather than feeling like they’re constantly being scrutinized by management for everything they do outside of work.
Employees are thus more likely to be respectful of the entire organization, while management also benefits as they don’t need to micromanage or constantly check on their progress. Additionally, employees who feel respected and trusted are more likely to remain engaged at work and in the organization for a longer period.
Are Hybrid Working Solutions Good or Bad for Employee Engagement?
Hybrid working solutions are the secret to turbocharging employee engagement. Just imagine your star employee; let’s call him Alex, who enjoys the cozy WFH setup on Monday, conquering tasks with ninja-like focus. Then, on Thursday, he’s high-fiving colleagues in the office, sparking spontaneous brainstorming sessions. This flexibility caters to diverse preferences, empowering Alex to thrive.
Hybrid working is like giving your work-life relationship a dynamic dance routine—it keeps things exciting, prevents monotony, and ensures everyone’s happily tapping their professional toes to the beat of productivity. Exciting, right? It’s a win-win situation for both employees and employers!
Hybrid Working: What Are the Concerns and Solutions
Hybrid work models might seem great on paper, but it is also fraught with its own set of risks and implications. Among the significant groups affected by this trend, IT administrators are the most alarmed. It is almost impossible for the organizations to track the workforce activities in a remote working environment; this certainly poses a possibility of concern for the organizations to safeguard sensitive data & documents, corporate-liable devices monitoring, and the management of remote workforces and their output.
Since the working environment is changing so rapidly, it becomes imperative for IT administrators to adopt reliable strategies in order to manage a large number of remote workers effectively and securely. Despite this, the traditional approaches to device management and data security such as simple passwords, cloudless security, compliance-only security are becoming outdated and are no longer sufficient to address the current work model scenarios. It is imperative that the IT administrators are outfitted with new tools and technologies or find other methods to handle their deployed corporate-liable devices and remote devices used by the remote workforces containing corporate data in a secure, convenient, and safe way.
In order to meet the rising demands, outsourcing IT services to external partners is the most straightforward solution. However, it is not without its concerns. How will an organization cope if the partner company cannot meet the expectations and demands as the trend further evolves? Is it a good idea (or secured to be more precise) to hand over confidential & sensitive organization’s data to an outside party? If not, what are the alternatives?
What if there were an easy-to-use tool/software/solution that could empower the organizations embracing the Hybrid work culture to cope with all these concerns mentioned above in an easy manner? A tool such as this is no longer a science fiction dream with the Scalefusion Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution.
In the following sections, we’ll explore how the adoption of hybrid work models might pose several concerns for an organization – and how Scalefusion’s (UEM) empowers them with the best way to address these boulders efficiently.
1. Management of remote workforces and mobile devices
A strategy for managing all the devices such as smartphones, desktops, or laptops used by the employees by an organization that utilizes a hybrid working model is to ensure that these devices are easily deployable and can be managed remotely.
It’s complicated at present times for the IT admins to set up a virtual meeting room and assist the employees opting to work remotely with the troubleshooting errors or diagnose the devices as and when required by the employees since they won’t be able to physically inspect those devices.
With Scalefusion UEM, organizations can seamlessly provision devices through easy-to-follow deployment methods including:
- Google Zero-touch deployment for Android devices
- Apple’s DEP (Device Enrollment Program)
- Samsung’s KME (Knox Mobile Environment)
- Windows 10’s Autopilot
In addition, Scalefusion facilitates additional functionality that helps the organizations to:
- Update apps and operating systems automatically and remotely.
- Facilitates rapid device troubleshooting through remote cast and control features.
- Allows remote deletion of noncompliance devices as well as dis-enrollment.
2. Keep an eye on employee productivity
Monitoring the efficiency of all the workforces while they execute their day-to-day chronological tasks in a traditional office is very easy for an organization. However, it is highly complicated to keep tabs on employee work time schedules when they are dispersed across the country and sometimes on another continent.
With the adoption of Scalefusion UEM solution, organizations can:
- Monitor, manage and configure/restrict the corporate-liable devices as well as the Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to mission-critical applications & documents (either in Single app kiosk mode or Multi app kiosk mode).
- Implement pre-determined corporate policies and configurations to eliminate distractions from unauthorized content during mission-critical task execution.
- Track the live location of the dispersed workforces devices via the Location tracking feature so as to ensure that the remote and on-field employees spread across geographies are at the work location as defined by the organization.
- Configure the content filtering feature allowing for safe browsing of the internet and limits employee access to unproductive websites as well.
3. Security of mobile devices
IT admins would also be alarmed by the concerns related to the security of mobile devices deployed among employees working in an organization carrying corporate sensitive data and information. How would the office handle the loss of the corporate-liable devices deployed to its remote workforces carrying these sensitive data? Who shall an organization hold liable if someone unauthorized attempts to access the device, or worse, steal or compromise the data in it? These risks are all taken care of with Scalefusion UEM.
Additionally, there may be unforeseen circumstances when an enterprise’s deployed mobile device is lost or stolen and finding a reliable solution to mitigate the risk of leakage of company files might turn out to be a nightmare. The Scalefusion solution empowers the IT administration to perform a remote wipe on a lost or stolen device to safeguard the corporate data that lies on it from misuse or falling into the wrong hands of malicious actors.
In order to ensure the corporate data is secure, Scalefusion UEM empowers the IT admins to:
- Remotely implement various restrictions and make the deployed devices fleet more manageable.
- Implement security features such as:
i) Passcode protection
ii) Blocking and whitelisting of sites with advanced profanity filters
iii) Securing device authorization with encryption
iv) Enabling and disabling certain resources that may potentially compromise data as a precautionary measure, etc.
4. Analytics & Insights
The introduction of a hybrid working model approach will require business leaders to be able to monitor their entire workforce, as well as evaluate things such as device uptime, usage metrics, and various other factors. It can be difficult to get an end-to-end view of an entire ecosystem when endpoints are scattered around the country or even the globe.
The solution to this is full-stack observability for all the tools you use. While tracking your IT systems only helps you detect anomalies, observability allows you to understand why those anomalies occurred and how to plug gaps in your IT architecture and application performance.
Most Mobile Device Management solutions available in the market empower the IT admins with the ability to monitor the general health of the deployed mobile device while providing precise and real-time device inventory insights. As part of the feature providing Analytics & Insights, organizations can also obtain real-time reports aligned to all the security compliance requirements of all enrolled devices through an intelligent interface for decision-making on operational efficiency for the organization.
Reporting tools, insights, and analytics will be an integral part of hybrid work device management strategies. By having a greater understanding of the device analytics and the overall health of what remote and on-site staff are using, companies will be able to make more informed decisions about their future investments.
Wrapping Up
As we wrap, remember: it’s not just about where you work but how you work. Trusting the flexibility of hybrid work models, a workforce capable of dazzling feats, seamlessly transitioning from home comfort to office friendships. It’s a symphony of productivity with the right notes of balance.
So, as the curtains fall, let your work-life story be a chart-topper, blending the best melodies of WFH and office vibes. Here’s to a harmonious future where the hybrid rhythm keeps us all grooving via Scalefusion MDM, where all issues associated with the hybrid model can be addressed at once.
Contact us to know how Scalefusion can support your IT team in managing a hybrid work environment. Begin your 14-day free trial today!
FAQs
What is hybrid working and how does it benefit enterprises?
Hybrid working is a flexible work model combining office and remote work. It benefits enterprises by boosting employee satisfaction, reducing commuting stress, and increasing productivity through a balanced work environment.
What challenges can enterprises face when implementing hybrid working?
Challenges in implementing hybrid working include maintaining communication, securing the data, fostering collaboration, and ensuring equal opportunities for remote and in-office employees. Balancing workloads and addressing potential feelings of isolation are also key.
Is there a difference between hybrid work and working from home?
Hybrid work involves a blend of office and remote work. Working from home typically implies full-time remote work. While both offer flexibility, hybrid work allows for a more balanced and varied work arrangement.
Which technologies and tools are useful for supporting hybrid workforces?
Technologies like video conferencing tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams), mobile device management (Scalefusion), and cloud platforms (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) support seamless communication and collaboration for hybrid workforces.
How can enterprises ensure employee engagement and productivity in a hybrid work setup?
Ensuring employee engagement in a hybrid setup involves regular communication, virtual team-building activities, and promoting a supportive culture. Providing flexibility, recognizing achievements, and investing in employee well-being contribute to sustained productivity and satisfaction.
