Making a successful data-driven transition to hybrid work

Before the pandemic, I would never have imagined that work from home would be the new normal. Long commutes and in-person meetings seemed just the natural way of the working world. But even now after the end of the public health emergency, labor market trends continue to favor work-from-home or hybrid work environments. As a result, some experts estimate that up to 25% of current offices could become obsolete by 2030 in favor of remote and hybrid work. 

However, most of us still aren't quite ready to make the transition. Here are five ways your company can facilitate efficient hybrid work in a data-driven way that keeps you and your employees happy, while also maximizing the benefits to your business. 

Find out what your employees need
Whenever you're starting to make changes in your office space, the first thing you need to do is collect data so you know how to best allocate your resources and make your employees happy. In the world of smart sensors and devices, you can make your workplace optimization fully data-driven with occupancy and temperature sensors. You can use software to track the resulting metrics or engagement data. 

Read more:  'Empower, not control': How EY gets employees excited about hybrid work

Each day your workers are in the office, track where they are and how they're spending their time. Is there an area where they naturally tend to congregate? Are large areas of office space going mostly unused? If so, then why? Is it something as simple as uncomfortable chairs,  poorly functioning AC, or overly-intense lighting? Remember that your employees vote with their feet: where they are during the day are the areas you need to optimize for them. 

Companies can use smart sensors and other data-gathering tools to keep a clear view of any patterns and optimize the work environment as much as possible. The more you can accommodate your employees, the more they're going to appreciate the benefits of in-person work. Utilize data to discover what's not working and remove it. Find out what works well and double down on it. And as your workforce, goals, and needs change, feel free to improvise. Rearrange cubicles, set up movable partitions to set off resting areas or social areas for your crew, and optimize the workplace however you can. 

Give workers some space
Distributing your real estate footprint and increasing flexibility is key to a hybrid strategy because it directly enables you to make the changes to continually reduce commute time as your employees change. So analyze where your offices are and whether there's a way to locationally optimize the workplace. Are there buildings you can rent that are closer to your employees? Can you close down some of your offices that are further out from the majority of your workers and find a better location? 

Read more:  HubSpot's 'hybrid enablement manager' works to ease remote-work pain points

The next thing you can do is improve collaboration on site. At the start of the pandemic, the office world scrambled to get the technology and resources together to facilitate productivity for employees stuck at home. And it turned out remote work was not only possible, but could increase employee satisfaction and reduce overhead for the company. The problem? Fully remote work meant sacrificing the social, collaborative, and ultimately the aspects of in-person attendance that make teams productive. Cue the emergence of hybrid work. 

Hybrid work allows employees to work from home part-time and in the office the rest of the time. The remote aspect provides a focused space for non-collaborative work to get done while reducing overhead. Meanwhile, the office becomes a site for collaboration, allowing employees to mentor each other, ideate together and become a team. So make the office a magnet for collaborative activities and communicate that purpose to your team. It should be a place where employees are comfortable collaborating rather than just a place for them to sit in separate cubicles at their computers. 

Additionally, make a company habit of explicitly dividing your project management into two categories: focused/individual work and collaborative work. After all, some projects are best done outside noisy group areas, while others need multiple employees to work in close collaboration. You'll need to redesign your offices accordingly in a way that provides space for both collaborative work and individual projects, so consider equipping your office space with both privacy booths and huddle rooms. 

Read more:  5 reasons why hybrid work is a win-win for employers and employees

For example, let's say one of your employees needs to write a report with few interruptions. That's the role of a privacy booth where that employee can likely stay more focused without the distraction of other employees. On the other hand, in-person collaboration produces much more creative ideas and strategies, so you may find it's considerably more effective to bring your team together in the office. Determining how to give employees what they need in your current office space will help you maximize efficiency. 

That leads to the next thing you should do: create some type of labeling/room booking system to help team managers know what's happening where and when so they can see how teams are interacting and collaborating. They'll also be able to see which rooms are most used for which tasks and which type of work is best suited to each. Occupancy data will help you know how best to label and book rooms. 

The most important part of transitioning successfully is to listen to what your employees and the data have to say. Then, make it so that whether your workforce is in the office today or mostly at home, every employee is in the place that makes them the most productive and the most comfortable.