“Half of Facebook may work remotely by 2030, Twitter and Square’s employees would be allowed to work from home or wherever they feel most creative and productive, even when offices begin to reopen. Google has already told that a majority of the workforce will work from home until 2021. And companies across the globe are continuing to provide flexibility to their employees while choosing their workplace.”
These tech-giants and many others have spent more than a decade to build amenity-filled workplace as a benchmark of today’s workplace to entice their employees and fulfil their business needs, which mostly includes accessibility to a variety of food options, fitness centre, lockers and showers, shared conference area, and huddle spaces. But this pandemic has shown that employees can be more or less equally productive when they work from home. A well-managed remote meeting can be as effective as face-to-face, virtual daily meetings help with progress and blockers, virtual tea lightens the mood, performance can be tracked on Trello.
This raises a question – Will these tech-giants abandon their buildings and shrink their physical footprints? How work from home will look like? What kind of collaboration tools are going to be a necessary equipment? Needless to say, work from home is helping us muddling through this crisis, but this has shown us the future of work – Hybrid Workplace Model.
Salesforce surveyed over 3,500 consumers worldwide to gain a pulse check on how workers view the prospect of returning to the next normal and concluded that 43% of Gen Z workforce are interested in hybrid approach to work.
What is Hybrid Workspace Model?
A model that supports work from office and work from anywhere, which could be a home, a coffee shop, or a co-working space, encouraging people to operate in full capacity without restricting them to a certain place. This way, people choose to come to office because they want to, because they need to complete something or get something done or meet the client in-person, rather than an obligation. The concept is already making people happy and engaged, as they have freedom of choice.
Advantages of Hybrid Workplace
- Flexibility to work from anywhere
- Increases productivity and job satisfaction
- Outcome-based work rather than hour-based
- High-quality visual collaboration devices ensure progress in the right direction
- Hiring talent all across the globe
- Optimized operational and infrastructure cost
Layout of Hybrid Workspace
Now, when some employees would be at office while a few would be collaborating remotely, booking a meeting room or going back to conference room frequently could be a problem. The space should be redesigned with small huddle spaces and every desk should have a device and software to visually collaborate with teams.
Usually, the entire bay has one conference room, wherein teams were collaborating by booking their slots or having an ad-hoc brainstorming with the colleagues around, right from their desks. The crisis that has showed no sign of bringing the normalcy back, has brought a major transformation in the workplace layout.
With hybrid workspace, just walk-in and start your meeting, without setting up, or waiting for the others.
Preparing Team for Hyrbid Workspace
While implementing hybrid workspace, choosing the right technology at the workspace as well as remote workplace is necessary, which should result in high-quality collaboration experience and productivity.
From the desk to the board room, Cybernetyx offers a wide range of devices so the teams should focus on effective collaboration, irrespective of the location.
Thinker Connect and Thinker View are designed to deliver high-quality collaboration and interaction among different teams. With Thinker Connect, you can join the session, meet in high-quality video conferencing, and co-annotate on the shared screen, from any device while Thinker View allows enterprise-level video conferencing on any standard panel. These devices allow teams to work without bothering about from where to work.
At Office
- No need to book a room – utilize the desk or huddle space
- Touch-interactive surface allows co-annotation
- High-quality video and audio feature enhance video conferencing
- Gets paired with different devices and allows content sharing
At Remote Workplace
- Allows different teams to join from different places.
- Different teams can collaborate on the shared canvas
- Whiteboarding tools make communication and explanation effective
- High-quality video and audio feature streamline communication
Compulsory tools to implement Hybrid Workplace
- Instant messaging software – Slack
- Video conferencing software – Zoom, Teams
- Video conferencing device – Thinker View
- Visual collaboration software – Airmind Flow, Miro
- Visual collaboration hardware – Thinker Connect
- Documents, files, and folders – OneDrive / Google Suite
Transition from one conference room to many collaboration spots is shifting the trend of having one large display in a bay to more displays at every desk, enabling employees to collaborate faster and better. Even demand in technology solutions have been shifted. Moving the large interactive panel is not a feasible option and portable devices are getting preferred.
Thinker Connect and Thinker View, video conferencing devices for standard panels are a perfect huddle space solution that fits on the top of any monitor and allows collaboration in no time. These portable devices maximize the collaboration at lower cost.
Let’s find out the reasons how hybrid work model is winning over routine work culture?
About The Author: Sindhya Ravikumar
More posts by Sindhya Ravikumar