Advantages of a Hybrid Workspace
A hybrid work model is one in which employees spend some time working in the office while some is spent working from home. This type of model had already been trending upwards when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The risk of infection forced many more companies to adopt this model to keep their employees safe. The hybrid model also offers advantages to a post-pandemic world of business.
Improved Mental Health
In the early days of the pandemic, many companies moved to adopt a hybrid workplace to preserve the physical health of their workforce. However, research shows that it can also help to improve mental health. Your employees spend some time at work, allowing for human interaction that prevents them from feeling completely isolated. However, the time spent working from home also helps to reduce burnout and stress that can result from trying to balance work-life obligations. A true work-life balance may be an unachievable goal, but adopting a hybrid work model may help your employees to achieve a better work-life fit.
Better Collaboration
A hybrid model provides your employees with different ways to interact with one another. Sometimes they meet face-to-face, while at other times they collaborate virtually via the videoconferencing platform of your choice. Individuals may be more comfortable with one format of communication than the other, but because the hybrid model involves both, everyone will have the opportunity to use his or her preferred communication method on occasion, which helps encourage better collaboration.
Learning Possibilities
Some career fields require continued education, but all industries have the potential to benefit from it. When your employees spend all their days in the office working toward performance goals, they may not have time to pursue learning opportunities that could benefit your company as a whole. Adopting a hybrid model offers them greater flexibility to pursue continuous learning, which is to your company’s advantage as well as to the employees individually.
Lower Costs
When your employees only spend a portion of their time in the office, you do not have to supply them with all the office supplies, furniture, and space that you did when everyone was in the office at the same time. Due to the lower occupancy levels, you can set up fewer workstations and perhaps even relocate to a smaller office space. This can save you money on rent, and creating more versatile spaces can help you save on office furniture. You may be able to sell some old, unneeded desks and cubicles. You can probably find other ways to save on business expenses when you adopt a hybrid model.
Increased employee satisfaction
Surveys conducted at the end of 2020, in which many more employees than ever before had been working from home due to COVID safety measures, showed that employees who worked remotely reported much more satisfaction with their jobs than those who did not. Part of this was due to the ability to make their own schedules and work when they wanted.
However, even when this was not an option, i.e., employees were still expected to work structured schedules, they still reported greater satisfaction. Working from home significantly cut down on commute times for many employees in the study, giving them more time to spend with their families or pursue new hobbies. It allowed them to dress comfortably and casually, and even if they worked a traditional schedule, it offered them benefits that they wouldn’t have at many workplaces, such as the ability to have pets nearby while they worked.
Increased Productivity
Part of the reason why many companies were slow to adopt the hybrid model and only did so out of necessity was because of a belief that, without supervisors constantly breathing down their necks, employees working from home would slack off and productivity would suffer. The pandemic allowed an opportunity to test this hypothesis, and the results did not bear it out at all. If anything, the data showed that productivity increased. Working from home provided a quiet, more comfortable environment in which employees were able to concentrate better.
Even when employees were required to come into work as part of the hybrid model, allowing them to choose their own hours allowed them to schedule commutes when the roads are less crowded, decreasing travel time.
