Mastering Hybrid Work: Strategies for Success

In partnership with Her Canberra, Humanify HR Consulting has prepared some helpful guidance for our community: Making Hybrid WORK: How to make working anywhere work for everyone.

Hybrid working has become a popular flexible working option for many people and organisations. The popularity of hybrid working rose significantly during the pandemic. 

Since the rise in popularity of hybrid working, there have been many studies conducted to examine the benefits of hybrid working.  The benefits reported have been wide ranging from:

1.       Enhanced engagement and productivity: employees use the time they would normally spend on travel to the office often work extra hours and are reported to be more energised, engaged, productive and focused at work.

2.       Improved safety: employees who are not required to physically attend the office are at less risk of transmitting viruses and other diseases (ie: COVID-19).

3.       Higher levels of employee wellbeing:  employees are provided with more autonomy that enables them to achieve greater work/life balance – leading to more positive wellbeing outcomes.

4.       Improved diversity and inclusion outcomes: employees can more freely participate in the workplace without barriers that are present when working in physical workplaces, so this provides an enormous benefit to many diversity groups.

5.       Reduces operating costs and expenses: for employers they no longer need to incur in some cases expensive overheads that go with physically accommodating employees and employees can reduce daily expenses on fuel, insurance, transportation and other incidental expenses.

For hybrid work to be a success in any organisation, it needs to be underpinned by a culture and leadership approach that signals to employees in the simplest of terms that:

1.       We see and respect you as an adult with a life outside of work;

2.       We pay you to do a job here to the best of your ability; and

3.       We trust you will do that job well. 

This in many cases, is a significant shift to make for employers and leaders, as traditional models of work that defined our history had origins in production and factory work – driven by principles of supervision, command, control and output.  We have known well before the pandemic that these traditional models of work were not serving us well, and that a more human solution was needed.  Hybrid work provides both employers and employees the opportunity to create a more productive and human-centric model of work.

Flexible working presents an enormous opportunity to restructure traditional models of work that we know are outdated and require a more human approach. However, we need to recognise that not everyone is on the same page when it comes to hybrid work - so it is important that we work together to make hybrid work for everyone.