Staying Productive and Relevant in a Hybrid Work Environment: 4 Practical Tips

While remote work was not as common pre-pandemic, things have changed quite a lot in the past few years. Working from home is not a luxury anymore, it has become commonplace for many businesses worldwide. On top of that, many businesses choose the option to create a hybrid work environment. That way, employees can choose if they want to work from home or from the office. However, staying productive in a hybrid work environment has its fair share of challenges.  

Using a task management system

One of the difficulties of having a hybrid work system is that not everyone is in the same place. That means it can be quite challenging to establish who works on what task and monitoring them can be even more difficult. The best thing you can do to avoid such a thing is to create a task management system. Tools like Slack do a very good job for that, and there are industry-specific tools that you can focus on according to your requirements.

If you use a task management system, it becomes a lot easier to communicate with others, track the progress of every piece of that project, but also see what work was assigned to each team member. Having a synchronous task system like this is a life-saver and it can make it easier for your business to stay productive. 

Online systems like these can make it much easier to retain control over the project and what everyone does. Otherwise you would have to manually talk with everyone and monitor their progress. However, a task management system speeds things up, and it will allow you to save a lot of time. The advantage of such a system is that you can also choose to schedule tasks for each employee. That way you can ensure they get the best tasks and assignments appropriate to their work environment. 

Prioritize tasks

One of the issues that appear in the hybrid work environment is certainly improper scheduling. What you will notice is that most of the time you will end up having too much work and some tasks take more than they should. It might not be a problem at first, but once you start getting more and more work, that’s very hard to do. 

And it also makes it harder that you have to split it between people that work from home and those in the office. That’s why setting priorities and working on crucial tasks first can help a lot. You can split these tasks between the remote and onsite teams, or you can only send them to a certain team if you want. 

Setting priorities can help because you can have people off-site work on crucial tasks first, and that can help especially if they have a different schedule to the on-site team. That’s the beauty of having a hybrid work system, you can have people working around the clock if you want, or everyone works at the same time. Having that flexibility makes it easier to prioritize and manage your tasks. That way the team at the office will get to work on other things, while the remote team will also get to assist and speed up the project delivery time.

Using the cloud

Obviously one of the best options to focus on is to rely on systems that help enhance your productivity. Having all the necessary tools and items in a single place can help, and it will also speed up the way you work. Plus, there’s also the advantage of not having to constantly ship paperwork from one employee to another.

By having a digital version and ensuring that everyone can access it in real time, it’s a lot easier for your team to stay productive. It also encourages hybrid work, since you can easily use the documents or files regardless of where you are. However, that also means there’s a lot more focus on having a backup for all the documents. The cloud can be a great place to store documents and files, but it also makes sense to set a third party system in place where you establish a backup. 

Safety is paramount, especially when it comes to hybrid work. That’s why, if you decide to use a cloud system, you want to provide adequate training to all the employees. That’s extremely helpful and it can provide you with an exceptional opportunity to ensure everything works exactly the way it should. 

You can also prevent unwanted access to the company documents if you use the cloud. Hackers would need to access someone’s credentials and also try to decrypt any documents. It’s imperative to encrypt your content even if it’s in the cloud, as it will allow you to save time, while also adding an extra security layer. 

Establish a routine and break system

When it comes to hybrid work, it can be very hard to narrow down a schedule that works for everyone. However, you can try to create a routine and ensure that everyone knows what they need to work on. Creating employee pay stubs is going to come in handy, and you also want an app that helps establish a proper schedule for all employees.

Remember that not all employees will be able to work at the same time. For example, those working remotely should have a different schedule, a flexible one if possible. Ideally, you want to have a team working at a different time than the on-site employees, so you can easily cover multiple time zones and have people working round the clock on a project. 

Moreover, you need to establish a break system to avoid situations like burnout at the workplace. Having a notification system that lets people know when to take a break is always helpful. It’s a great idea because it helps ensure everyone maintains a healthy routine and they don’t overwork themselves.

Trying to customize every schedule according to the needs of each person can also help. Yes, it’s more time-consuming, but it will help save a lot of effort and time. All you need to do is to constantly ask your team for feedback and experiment with changes to see what fits. Not all companies will have the same schedule, so it helps to try out new ideas until you find something that fits very well.

Conclusion

These are only a few of the many ways you can stay productive within a hybrid work environment. The truth is that you do need to adapt to the idea of having teams in multiple places, and some of them being online-only. However, once you adjust and adapt your company to this idea, it will make things a lot easier and more convenient. 

Sharing a calendar, setting boundaries, focusing on ergonomics and trying to use apps or the cloud to circumvent any communication problems can be very helpful. On top of that, you always want to stay up to date with the latest remote tech, because it can speed up processes, automate tasks, while also adding more convenience and value. At the end of the day, a hybrid work environment is fully customizable, but there’s no framework that will work for any business. Doing some trial and error, identifying what works for your company and constantly making chances is the best way to ensure a productive, dependable and comprehensive hybrid work environment!