Preparing your workplace for hybrid
Like most companies, the shift to remote work happened almost overnight, with impacts to company culture, infrastructure, and processes. The implications of hybrid work can’t be understated for digital transformation leaders—from this moment forward, every investment needs to be considered through multiple dimensions of the employee experience.
Digital capabilities
The pandemic and subsequent shift to hybrid work served as an accelerant to efforts to improve the employee experience for employees and customers. Among questions that need to be asked is, “Absent a physical presence, how does a company create a sense of culture and connection?”
Hybrid meetings with Microsoft Teams
Deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe is a significant challenge, even in pre-pandemic times. Because employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As we prepare for a return to the workplace, we’re preparing our physical and virtual capabilities for an improved hybrid meeting experience.
Securing employee experiences across devices, apps, and infrastructure
When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy in 2020, some organizations were more prepared than others, not because they had anticipated the pandemic, but because we had already done the work to shift nearly every critical workload to the cloud, implementing a Zero Trust security model. A cloud-first strategy is critical in a hybrid world.
Zero Trust security ensures a healthy and protected environment by using the internet as the default network with strong identity, device health enforcement, and least privilege access. It reduces risk by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access (just-in-time, just-enough-access) to only explicitly authorized resources.
Physical spaces and facilities
One of the three critical questions that all digital transformation leaders need to ask as they consider a return to the workplace is “What are the changes needed in the physical environment to support an inclusive and equitable approach to hybrid productivity?”
After all, the best digital experiences mean very little if you don’t have the right physical spaces or hardware to maximize their potential for collaboration. And even more important than productivity is “How can I keep my employees safe and healthy?”
Cultural norms
While investments in hardware and physical spaces are important, the greatest technology in the world won’t help unless people embrace best practices and apply consistent norms to ensure that all meetings are inclusive and that remote participants continue to have a great experience. While norms might vary based on your location, culture, and technical capabilities, digital transformation leaders should consider these simple steps:
- Meeting room audio
- Make sure in-person meeting rooms have a centralized audio device so remote attendees can hear the conversation clearly.
- Joining meetings
- Encourage everyone to join with their camera on, at least at the beginning. This helps foster personal connections that support collaboration.
- Nominate a moderator
- Appoint an in-room moderator to help everyone be heard by monitoring meeting chats and, “raised hands,” and to watch for participants unknowingly on mute.
Driving adoption of new employee experiences
An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change management services to ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In fact, the importance of change management is so great, it’s reflected in our organizational vision.
The roadmap to change
- Envision the change
- Understand the change, define the audience, build the right team, and define the right success metrics.
- Onboard the change
- Build your adoption plans, prepare change sponsors, identify and engage early adopters, then drive the change broadly.
- Drive Value
- Measure usage, satisfaction, and outcomes, and maintain employee engagement.
Conclusion
Hybrid work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re miles away. And they’ll be far less likely to leave for a competitor who has a more sophisticated and flexible model than you do.