The shift away from the traditional five-days-a-week in-office job is officially an irreversible one. Remote work has been shown to work well enough for companies, and it’s also an attractive perk for a lot of employees. The paradigm has shifted.
This evolution is ultimately a great thing because it can improve work-life balance without becoming a detriment to the company. However, full-on remote work does have the potential to become a detriment to employee loyalty, workplace culture, and in some instances even to the mental health of your workforce.
For those reasons and others, many organizations have been working with a hybrid schedule: a certain number of days at home and a certain number of days in the office. But even that presents its own problems.
Many of our clients question how they can keep employees connected, regardless of their in-office status. Fortunately, there are some simple ways to do just that.
Maintain Connections
While just about everyone deeply appreciates being able to work at home in their pajamas if they so choose, there are some pitfalls to working remotely. For one, it can become extremely isolating, especially if that employee lives alone. That isolation can be worsened when there is no sense of community in their job.
As a leader of your organization, you can attempt to remedy the problem of isolation with events like virtual happy hours, a casual chat thread in your communication channel, and other just-for-fun virtual activities for remote workers.
When it comes to hybrid work, you can emphasize communication even more by giving employees opportunities to connect in person during their time at the office. If there’s a sense of community when they are together, then not only will they want to be at the office but they’ll also feel more inclined to interact when they’re working from home.
Create an Office People Want to Be In
If you want your employees to be even remotely interested in coming to the office, you need to make the office an accommodating place to be. The baseline for that is providing them with the tools and technology they need to do their job, but it extends into the world of comfort and perks.
Ask yourself: “What can we have here that employees don’t have at home?” If you can answer that question, you can create an environment that employees look forward to being in.
Make Them Aware of Their Value
If your employees feel like faceless cogs in the machine, there’s no doubt they’ll prefer to be faceless cogs in the machine in their lounge clothes at home. If you can show them that they’re an important and needed part of your company, they will feel a greater sense of responsibility and be much more inclined to come to the office.
Employee recognition can and should be done in a variety of ways. From a one-on-one chat to a group celebration to an award or earned perk, you should be doing what you can to acknowledge the contributions of each of your employees as often as you can.
Be Flexible
The incredible appeal of hybrid work for your employees is the flexibility it allows, so don’t do anything that might unnecessarily hamper that flexibility.
If you can allow them to choose which days to come into the office, it’s only going to make coming in easier for them. If you’re rigid about which days they can come in, it’s liable to cause some inconveniences that they may be able to avoid at another job.
Encourage Feedback
If you really want to know how to keep your employees coming into the office, you can always ask them. Allow for anonymous feedback in order to take the temperature of your workforce, see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly.
The mere fact that you’re open to feedback can inspire more employee engagement all on its own, and the information that feedback provides can be critical.
Adapting your office to hybrid work is hard enough. Let AssetHR take care of all your human capital management needs. Contact us today to learn more.