The Agile Way to Creating a Better Hybrid Working Experience for Office-based and Remote Employees
Hybrid working is here – and looks likely to stay. Making the experience a better one for employees, at the office or working remotely, is a key challenge for organisations. With so many issues to consider, how do you set about making it happen?
In this short video, Ascentae Managing Director Jon Knight shares some advice and Product Manager Nick Palmer introduces some solutions to help make hybrid working work.
The Hybrid Office: A Better Experience
Transcript
Speaker Jon Knight
There are lots of ways that organisations can consider improving the quality of the experiences that they’re offering their employees. But before we look into some of those concepts, one of my first starting points is to think about this topic in an agile way.
Rather than trying to make wholesale changes, whether that’s changing all the carpets and furniture or investing in an entirely new technology platform, my advice would be to start with small proof of concepts.
Identify teams that want to participate in something new and then create a communication loop with the rest of your employees. Create that sense of curiosity around what’s going on and show your employees that the company takes this topic seriously.
You may not know what the experiences are that you want to create today, but what you’re saying is, “We want to identify those who want to put their hand up and be part of us testing the theory of something new, and we’re going to get some feedback and we’re going to share that data with you, and we’re actually going to make that data public.
And once we’ve made that data public, we’re going to tell you the things that we’ve learned from it and the things that we now believe that we can invest in or that we’d like to iterate upon, in order to consider the next thing that we want to test.”
Speaker Nick Palmer
Retaining talent and recruiting talent is an absolute imperative for businesses, particularly at the moment. We all hear stories about the great resignation, et cetera, et cetera. Technology can be integral to that.
Speaker Jon Knight
I think understanding all of these things from a talent retention and general employee well- being perspective is really important.
You don’t necessarily have to say, “We’re making wholesale and sweeping changes. We’re investing millions and millions of pounds,” but what you can say is, “We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re going to start trying, testing, and iterating upon those results and sharing as much as we can with you, as employees, because we value your input and your feedback to help us to define the experiences that we want to create in the future.”
Speaker Nick Palmer
Making your offices and collaboration spaces a much better experience than working from home encourages people to come to the office, develop their ideas, and collaborate in person.
An example of this would be the Valarea meeting room software, where users can gather in a room, share ideas, collaborate on an interactive canvas, as well as remote participants sharing those concepts and editing at the same time.
But adding to that MAXHUB LED video wall to create that absolute wow factor in that meeting room takes it above and beyond what is possible on a user in that environment working from home.
In terms of recruiting staff, having those office environments that deliver an experience over and beyond your competitors within that recruitment landscape, I see as an absolute key to bring in the best possible talent to your organisation.
