The pandemic has ruffled our daily lives and work-life routines in many ways. It has changed the mode of working for businesses! The way businesses shifted to remote work has indeed shattered traditional work designs. Born out of sheer necessity to ensure uninterrupted workflows during the pandemic, remote work has led companies to create digital workspace teams and embrace hybrid work models. Compared to the on-premise infrastructure, cloud platforms are globally accessible, secure, and less expensive (post-adoption). 

As the name indicates, a hybrid workplace model is a blend of in-office and remote work that offers more flexibility and support to employees and helps them achieve a better work-life balance. Decision-makers have shifted their business operations from location-centric models to human-centric models by providing suitable technological infrastructures and encouraging the right work culture of shared understanding of mutual needs and expectations. However, despite hybrid work being around for more than two years, several misconceptions still exist about hybrid workplaces. Let us have a look at five common myths about hybrid workplaces. 

Read more: Things to Know When Adopting Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Myth #1: Remote work hinders productivity

This is one of the biggest illusions about remote workspaces. On the contrary, lines between working hours and off-work hours tend to blur when employees work in a hybrid environment. Extreme flexibility drives productivity, and the absence of physical monitoring nurtures a culture of trust, empathy, and empowerment, boosting work outcomes. 44% of Buffer State of Remote Work /2022 Report say remote work helps them focus better on work, and 59% feel not having to commute daily has left them with more time on their hands that they can use productively. Being productive at work is more about following a culture of striking the work-life balance and achieving corporate goals than about the long hours of work you put in. Work outcomes matter more than activity metrics.

InfinCE a remote workplace collaboration platform, can help project team members to boost their productivity and efficiency by assisting them to work faster through collaboration and optimal use of resources. InfinCE has the tools that can bring together people across multiple geographies to plan meticulously and efficiently execute, allocate, track, and manage tasks while easing the management of documents.   

Myth #2:  It is more challenging to collaborate remotely than face-to-face

This runs true only in the case of non-adopters and nascent adopters of hybrid workspaces. Hybrid workspaces empower companies to develop capabilities to let their employees work from anywhere. Adopters of hybrid work technologies have at their disposal the right tools and methods that facilitate virtual teamwork and seamless collaboration.

InfinCE is a one-stop solution for businesses that plan to adopt a hybrid work model as it comes with multiple tools having capabilities to perform multiple tasks. In addition, the cloud-based solution provides an efficient collaborative work environment for all team members – internal, external, and remote – to come together in a virtual environment to work towards achieving project objectives and facilitate better workstreams. Besides, you can also buy additional apps that meet your specific business needs.

Read more: 5 Tips to Manage At-Home Workers and Boost Remote Work Productivity

Myth #3: Remote work hinders creativity and innovation

Proponents of this theory fail to realize that being in the office actually limits your chance to express your creativity to a handful of people around you. In contrast, the cloud technologies of a hybrid work environment enable reaching out to more employees, thus tapping more unique ideas and perspectives. Creative and innovative inputs from every team member are brainstormed, and the team jointly owns the final outcome. Therefore, it builds a culture of mutual trust and a sense of ownership. Unique perspectives never fail to be heard in a hybrid workspace. 

InfinCE enables real-time chat and communication among team members, and its centralized data, contacts, and documents help make informed decisions whenever online meetings are held. Intentional collaboration backed up by the tools that InfinCE offers will significantly drive innovation in workspaces.

Myth #4: Hybrid workspace models erode the corporate culture

This is yet another unfounded myth about hybrid workplaces that has gained traction. The fear that a lack of face-to-face sessions in a hybrid work environment erodes corporate culture is unfounded. Lack of future fitness and absence of key digital attributes like agility, speed, and autonomy in decision-making rendered several pre-pandemic work cultures sluggish. On the other hand, hybrid workspace models have the capabilities to reinforce corporate culture. Remote and hybrid employees have reported more culture satisfaction than on-site employees. Organizations must first identify the cultural norms they want to promote among their employees and the activities that reinforce those norms. Then plan measures to promote these behaviors in a hybrid model to create a common, shared purpose. For example, leaders could promote team bonding activities like movie/book club, contests, etc., to promote employee engagement and satisfaction.  

InfinCE can help foster virtual gatherings to enable intentional meetings of employees across diverse units and geographies. Online campaigns can be held to mark special and auspicious days to promote the participation of one and all. Such intentional collisions help them connect and interact with each other, which would be an unlikely scenario in the real world.

Watch: How to Keep Your Work From Home Staff Productive and in Touch – InfinCE Digital Workplace

Myth # 5: Speed and efficiency of hybrid work environment comprises reliability and efficiency of infrastructures

This myth reflects a legacy mindset that puts constraints on infrastructure speed and agility. As cloud technologies are constantly evolving, constant re-engineering and upgradation of IT strategies and infrastructures have become the norm of the day. Future-fit organizations employ “Everywhere Enterprise” strategies to empower dispersed hybrid workforces and widely distributed infrastructures to serve their omnipresent customers. 

Serving your ubiquitous customers ‘everywhere’ calls for a hybrid workforce, and what better way to make that happen than by embracing an efficient hybrid workspace solution like InfinCE? Being an efficient digital workplace, InfinCE has the tools and the technical and infrastructural capabilities to constantly upgrade our capabilities to ensure that organizations never miss out on state-of-the-art technologies. In addition, we provide individual dedicated servers for each organization with custom dashboards and tiles to facilitate smarter and simplified data analysis. 

Businesses must ensure consistent and secure network access for all employees to meet the ‘everywhere’ needs of a hybrid workforce. And InfinCE is here to simplify the IT operations of your business through a seamless collaboration of teams across diverse geographies and centralized management of tasks and documents. InfinCE is an infinite cloud enterprise for organizations at your fingertips!  

Reach out to our experts to know more.     

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed enterprises to adopt different work from home policies to keep their business operational. Yet after a prolonged remote working routine, organizations are now facing new challenges to reopen their offices. Most of it is due to the mixed emotions of employees returning to the office. It brings rise to the concept of a hybrid workplace – an approach that combines remote work policies with the usual office work culture.

In a hybrid workplace, employees have the flexibility to choose from working remotely or from the office in line with their job requirements and preferences. Many big enterprises have already started planning the best model for their hybrid workforce and determining how it would benefit their business and the employees. In fact, a strategic approach is crucial when adopting a hybrid work culture as reports from Boston Business Journals highlight that employees would rather turn down their raise (up to $30,000) in favor of working remotely.

Read more: Shifting to a Digital Workplace? Here’s What You Need To Know!

Enterprises Need to Embrace the Change

Companies need to realize that employee expectations have drastically changed over the past 18 months of working remotely. If they look ahead to attract and retain employees moving forward, they need to carefully draft their hybrid work model to fit the needs of their employees as well as the business. It requires redesigning the work policies, culture, and offices for the hybrid workforce.

A recent survey from the shared workspaces provider, WeWork, says  “75% of employees would give up at least one workplace perk for the freedom to choose their work environment.” Also,  around 50% of employees would “prefer to spend three days a week or fewer in the office, and when they do go in, they want to be there 5 hours a day or less.”

According to Quendrida Whitmore, SVP and head of community at WeWork, “The pandemic spurred a seismic shift in how we think about work. Employees prefer the flexibility to work where they want — at least a few days a week — and most companies of all sizes embrace hybrid work models.” However, adopting the hybrid workplace culture goes way beyond just providing flexible work options to the employees. It involves a tactical approach to ensure optimal employee engagement and overall productivity.

Read more: What is Hybrid Cloud Identity and Why It Matters for Your Business

5 Tips to Ensure Hybrid Workplace Success

To restart, companies need to think about using technology to facilitate employee management and drive expected operational efficiency. The hybrid workplace is expected to stay, so you need to ensure that your organization is ready to adopt it right and navigate the challenges effectively. Here are five tips that will get your hybrid work environment going.

1. Create Proper Channels for Communication

One of the most common challenges in remote work is to ensure good communication lines for employees. A hybrid workplace will not be devoid of this problem either, so you need to make sure that you have well-defined channels for communication between different departments as well as remote and on-premise employees. A robust team management suite like InfinCE can be a godsend in this scenario.

InfinCE ensures that your employees can easily interact with the relevant people with multiple options for one-on-one and group communication. What’s more, InfinCE also makes it much simpler for your employees to access the required information and business data to perform their jobs more effectively.

2. Set the Company Expectations and Goals Upfront

When managing a hybrid workforce, you need to ensure that your teams are on the same page and moving forward as expected. In a flexible work environment, it can be challenging to make sure that everyone on the team knows the metrics and team goals they need to achieve. This can, in turn, affect the overall productivity of the company and lead to an exhausted workforce.

InfinCE provides a unified dashboard to announce company news and pass the information to all the teams in real-time to resolve such challenges. It ensures to keep your remote and in-office teams aligned with the company goals and timelines to deliver their best performance.

Read more: All You Need to Know About Dashboards and Data Security

3. Collect Feedback to Make the System Better

Managers and supervisors give regular feedback to their teams to ensure they address specific pain points and improve their performance. Similarly, collect feedback from employees on the hybrid work culture. It is important to ask how your employees feel about the hybrid work environment to improve the system and tweak the processes as required.

An all-in-one team collaboration platform like InfinCE helps everyone in the team stay on the same page with constant communication, feedback, performance transparency, and goal tracking abilities.

4. Provide the Required Training to Your Employees

You will need to reimagine what skills your employees need to ensure optimal output in a hybrid workplace. The success of your hybrid workplace approach will heavily rely on how familiar your employees are with using digital technologies for work management. It can range from the ability to make decisions to collaborating virtually within different departments.

You have to reassess the skills of your team and create training programs to address the gaps effectively. InfinCE facilitates collaborative and democratic training and development through easy access to top LMS platforms. Allowing seamless integration, InfinCE lets take advantage of effective tools that help drive a skillful workforce and productive workplace.

Read more: How Can Organizations Profit More from Collaboration Software?

5. Integrate the Hybrid Work Culture into Recruiting

A major advantage of having a hybrid workplace is that you get the flexibility to hire candidates from anywhere across the world. The flip side of it also implies that employees can consider job offers from anywhere and join companies that best fit their needs. However, it creates a challenge when recruiting in-demand skills. Hence, you need to define employee engagement and support thoughtfully to attract new employees.

It goes true for retaining current employees as well. If you fail to integrate the brand value in your hybrid workplace culture, employees may start to look out for other opportunities. InfinCE helps integrate top CRM systems to help ease the onboarding process as well as keep staff motivated and engaged.

Do Not Rush It

You need to accept whether you are ready for a hybrid workplace or not. It is essential to have open interactions with your employees to determine whether they are willing to return to the office or prefer remote work. Likewise, you also need to evaluate the workforce capacity and rank your decisions on that. If only a few employees want to return to the office, it would be wiser to rethink reopening and draft the right working plan to suit your business needs.

InfinCE is a promising digital workplace collaboration platform that can easily bridge the gap between work from home and work from the office. InfinCE can easily transform your IT infrastructure into a digital friendy ecosystem at minimal budgets, establishing a convenient hybrid workplace model. To know more about how to get started with InfinCE, reach out to our experts or sign up here.