Using a Hybrid Work Policy in Your Firm: Step-by-Step

Taking Advantage of a Hybrid Work Policy: Step-by-Step

Let’s jump immediately into our main topic and explore the process of defining a hybrid work policy. An effective remote and in-office work policy should have a few important characteristics. These include clarity, simplicity, and fairness, all of which are important to ensure you get the most from your work. The key steps of implementing a hybrid work model at your business that we’ll explore are:

• Choosing your hybrid work model
• Establishing clear hybrid workplace guidelines
• Deploying a hybrid work management system
• Ensuring hybrid work compliance

Step 1: Choose your hybrid work model

Choosing a hybrid work model that suits your team well is the first step of the process. This choice will affect all other decisions you’ll have to make when implementing your hybrid work policies. While you can take advantage of hybrid work in lots of ways, a few of the most common ones are:

• Fixed hybrid work: This type of hybrid work policy involves set days of in-office and remote working. If you want your staff to work on-site on some days of the week and remotely on others, this is what you need. While this option is more limiting for your employees than the other two we’re going to explore next, it’s a good starting point.
• Flexible hybrid work: Flexible working arrangements are highly sought after by professionals worldwide. They provide an excellent degree of freedom to your team while allowing you to maintain the benefits of on-site working.
• Remote-first arrangements: Remote-first working is exactly what it sounds like. Your staff will spend most of their time working from home, their favorite cafes, or coworking spaces. However, they should also be ready to work on-site when it’s necessary, like to attend a meeting.

Besides what type of hybrid work policy, you should also consider what office space you’re going to be using. If you’re going to implement a remote-first arrangement, you’ll likely want to use a coworking space. However, if you want on-site work to be a big part of your team’s schedules, then you should consider investing in an office if you haven’t already.

Step 2: Establish clear hybrid workplace guidelines

After choosing how you wish to use hybrid working, you should establish clear hybrid work guidelines. These will help your staff know exactly what they should expect across their work schedules. A few key variables you should define are the following:

• Work hours: Whether your staff will work a fixed set of hours or be able to work whenever they wish.
• Office attendance: How often and exactly when your staff should work on-site.
• Technological requirements: What devices your staff will need to have to be able to work effectively, both on-site and remotely.
• Productivity tracking and management: What productivity tracking software your staff should expect to use in their day-to-day.

Speaking of tracking and management software, this is conveniently our next point of discussion.

Step 3: Deploy a hybrid work management system

Your hybrid work policies won’t be very effective if you don’t enforce them appropriately. You can do so with a number of software tools, including a feature-rich time tracking and productivity app like WebWork. WebWork will allow you to manage a lot of things relating to your hybrid work policies. These include employee shifts and work hours, which you can organize with the tracker’s Shift Scheduling feature. Tracking shifts is especially important when your staff are working remotely. Besides scheduling, WebWork will also allow you to ensure your staff are being productive when they’re working. The app will help you to identify productivity bottlenecks to eliminate them in time. You can even simplify this process by using WebWork AI and the productivity recommendations it can provide you with.

Step 4: Ensure hybrid work compliance

Ensuring compliance is another important aspect of implementing a hybrid work policy. If you pay your team by the hour, you’ll have to make sure that you pay them accurately. Fortunately, doing this is fairly straightforward with time tracking software. High-quality apps like WebWork have dedicated Payroll Tracking features that will help you pay your employees accurately with little effort. Another hybrid work compliance concern is data safety. If your staff deal with sensitive data frequently, you’ll have to use precautions to ensure no one outside of your firm can access it.

Hybrid Work Best Practices

Now, let’s take a look at a few key areas where you should pay attention to hybrid work best practices. These include:

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Team-building

Communication

Communication can be a challenge for remote and hybrid teams. A few good practices to follow in this area are:

• Choosing the right communication style: While your staff can do most of their work with emails and chat, sometimes synchronous communication through a tool like WebWork’s Video Meetings Software is a better option. Check out our blog article on asynchronous communication to learn more.
• Availability overlaps: Define periods of time that your staff should all be available at once. This will help you host meetings even when your team is working remotely.

Collaboration

Closely tied with our last point of discussion, collaboration is another important factor in any team’s success. The biggest collaboration best practice you should take advantage of is doing lots of it. Collaborative teams are more effective and can produce higher-quality work. So, you should foster an environment where your staff are encouraged to work together at every opportunity.

Team-building

Lastly, maintaining company culture is another challenging task for any company using a hybrid work model. There are a couple of things you can do to ensure your employees feel a part of the team. The most obvious of these is team-building activities, either online or in-person. They can help your staff form bonds with their coworkers that go further than just work.