To truly take charge in this intrepid new workplace, leaders need to take a step back, reflect on the lessons learnt and design for the future.

Let’s explore a framework and ideas for hybrid working.

To start, an effective hybrid workplace takes effort. You need a clear strategy – one that adapts to individual and organisational needs found both inside and outside the office. These decisions will impact everything from your culture, how you attract and retain talent, how you respond to change and how you innovate. Organisations will need to make sure strategy underpins experimentation. Don’t be afraid to roll out new initiatives or encourage creative ideas within your organisation. Use data and your employee’s own engagement to gauge success. Learn and correct as you go.

To build successful hybrid working, organisations need to think about three things: People, process and place. Underpinning these are empathetic and motivated leaders, and secure, inclusive technology powered by the cloud.

1. People 

Your people are the heart of your business. And their wellbeing is critical. Over 70 percent of employees want flexible remote working to continue, while over 65 percent crave more in-person time with their teams. Hybrid working requires leaders to ensure employees have the flexibility to work when and where they want.

A successful hybrid organisation embeds empathetic leadership and prioritises individual wellbeing to help people focus and be their best. Almost half of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer this year. This means to stay competitive you need to take a people-first approach to your hybrid working strategy. At Microsoft, we’ve taken this approach, building wellbeing into our daily priorities, including implementing Wellbeing Days – additional paid time off for employees to focus on themselves.

The NHS took this approach when building its partnership with Microsoft. GPs, consultants, nurses, therapists, paramedics and support staff now have the digital tools to help them collaborate more effectively and access the information they need, when they need it.

 “Adopting the most up to date digital tools and operating systems are crucial for a modern day NHS – allowing staff to work as efficiently as possible which will deliver even better care for patients.” 

Matt Hancock, Secretary of State 

A major benefit to hybrid working is the growth you’ll see in your talent pool. Because job roles are no longer required to be near the office, you’ll attract more diverse talent. And with secure digital tools that improve accessibility, productivity and anywhere collaboration you will drive a more inclusive workplace. 

Building digital skills

And speaking of skills, underpinning the hybrid workplace is technology. Cloud-enabled devices and intelligent apps that support operations, collaboration, and productivity all require digital knowledge. Our research found that 63 percent of UK employees said they don’t have the digital skills needed to fulfil these roles. You can help start your employee’s learning paths on Microsoft Learn, and take advantage of on-demand training and events. 

Building your employee’s skills is essential. To keep your organisation competitive and innovative. To help your employees learn, reinvent and grow. And ultimately, to help our nation’s economy. This isn’t a one off. You need to implement an always–on culture of learning. This will help support employees and drive innovation.  

2. Process 

According to Accenture, organisations are focussing on digital transformation to the sum of $1.2 trillion globally, but are neglecting culture change. While technology can empower the hybrid working culture, it cannot create it. It needs to be a whole organisational shift. Leaders need to come together to unlock the data, expertise, and knowledge of the organisation.  

Equip employees with both digital skills and secure low/no code enterprise app technology to give them the autonomy to solve challenges and reimagine traditional processes. When you automate processes and workflows, you can innovate manual work, reduce errors and discover new insights to improve services.

We’ve partnered with Refinitiv to help financial firms connect, collaborate and unlock the power of their data. By doing this, organisations can make critical business decisions faster and gain new insights into their markets and customers, helping critical business decisions.  

“When you add tools within that collaboration platform to help people surface information quickly, you create a seamless experience that brings the best of technology and data together with the human expertise needed to move markets forward.” 

Ben Shepherd, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Refinitiv 

Make sure you provide policies and technology that support synchronous collaboration – meetings, voice and video calls – as well as asynchronous collaboration – where team members can dip in and out of projects and work when they have the time. Lean on your collaboration platform to build variety and encourage connectivity anywhere. For example, encourage non-work related check-ins, voice-only walking calls to prevent screen fatigue, or even buddy up colleagues from different teams for informal chats. 

Leaders will need to embed a process of continuous testing, observing, and adjusting to processes to ensure they grow with your organisation and adapt to your employee’s needs. 

3. Place 

Now we’re planning a hybrid workforce, office space is no longer limited to the office. 

Leaders must balance virtual and physical workplace to ensure equality and inclusion for everyone. To do this effectively, we need to restructure the physical workspace and invest in digital tools.  

Humans are social creatures. Everyone – from those working at home, in the office or on the frontline – needs to be able to have a voice and feel included in your culture. Cloud-enable AV solutions such as Teams Rooms and interactive screens such as the Surface Hub 2S placed in meeting and social spaces can enhance collaboration and inclusivity. 

However, it’s equally important that offices don’t become event venues. Your space must reflect the changing nature of the hybrid workplace, with the flexibility to adjust the physical environment for different scenarios, for example, collaboration spaces and focus areas. 

Nationwide is integrating technology into their London new digital hub. Their ambition is to ensure Microsoft Teams is in every meeting room to ensure colleagues can join physical meeting rooms remotely, supporting greater collaboration and efficiency. 

“The workplace of the future will be about choice, with the flexibility to be where we need to be to do our jobs as effectively as possible. Technology is essential as it provides the infrastructure needed so we can work dynamically.” 

Patrick Eltridge, Chief Operating Officer at Nationwide 

Use data to improve hybrid working flows

At Microsoft, we are surveying employees and looking at data such as social graphs and employee traffic patterns. This helps us provide the right spaces for teams, while understanding how those needs evolve over time. 42 percent of employees say they lack essential office supplies at home. Therefore, it’s important to ensure you equip your employees with the right tools both at home and in the office. Microsoft Graph enables you to pool data across Microsoft 365 to inform business intelligence. This can boost user productivity, creativity, and team collaboration, while protecting business resources and users’ data from anywhere. 

Leaders need to set the tone for hybrid working. The strategy and plan to embed collaboration, creativity and culture into the hybrid workplace must come from the top. You need to ensure you look after your own wellbeing, taking regular days out of the office and logging offline when the day ends. This will help avoid the rise of presenteeism at the workplace or online.  

Building sustainable growth with hybrid working

We are no longer bound to traditional notions of working. Our hybrid working framework lets us set aside our assumptions and start building a more flexible, people-focussed approach. 

We believe this is an opportunity to progress. To drive sustainable growth and foster an accessible, innovative, and supportive culture. One ​where everyone is inspired, and no one is left behind.  

Find out more 

Discover how to help your organisation be more agile and resilient 

Create an agile and innovative workplace 

About the author

Nick leads the Modern Work and Security business for Microsoft UK and has a passion for helping individuals and organisations to become more productive. Personal and organisational productivity is high on the list for every leader right now; Nick and his team dedicate their working hours to the role that Microsoft technologies can play as part of a business transformation journey.

The post 3 steps to build a successful hybrid working framework appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

“We’ve seen two years of digital transformation in two months.”
Satya Nadella, CEO.

At Microsoft, we spent the last few months learning from our customers and studying how we’re all adapting to the challenges of today. What’s clear is that we see the world going through three distinct phases:

1. Responding to the immediate impact of COVID-19.
2. Recovering and how organisations are getting back on track and functioning in the new normal.
3. Re-imagining the very nature of their operations through innovations born of necessity from the previous two phases.

These phases will help build resilience and power the UK economic and societal recovery. We need to stay secure, be agile, and empower our people to achieve more.

How organisations responded

COVID-19 led to a digital first response as firms quickly enabled their employees to work remotely. We saw Microsoft Teams use generating over 5 billion meeting minutes in a single day during the first quarter of 2020. Legal & General uses Teams to allow contact centre employees to work from home. This meant that customers were still able to get help from the financial services business during critical times. Our collective response has shifted technology conversations to the boardroom. But it has mainly been focussed on replicating the office at home. However, is this truly the optimal way for organisations to operate in the ‘new normal’?

A chance to adapt and re-imagine

With great change comes great opportunity. This is a chance to adapt and re-imagine your business strategy and the role that technology will play in it. And not just in your response, but over the next two phases by focussing on:

• Culture: Managing talent, investing in skills, and equipping all employees with the right tools.
• Leadership: Managing the new interplay between employees and technology to optimal effect.
• Technology: Supporting new communications and workflows that empower employees.

How to build a hybrid workplace

Phase 2 is where we will see the true emergence of a hybrid workplace. For organisations, a key challenge will be developing a sound strategy that meets employee’s new expectations on the way they work.

A recent survey we did found that 72 percent of UK employees and managers want to work from home at least part time. But there’s still a need for human interaction – 62 percent feel less connected to their team when they were working from home. Therefore, it’s important to recognise that not everything can be done virtually. And indeed, not everyone can work remotely, especially in the case for industries such as retail and manufacturing.

Take Nationwide, for example. In June, employees made 2.5 million video calls on Teams. This prompted the bank to build on this technology, and now they are working to integrate Teams into all their meeting rooms to ensure everyone can take part in meetings.

Patrick Eltridge, Chief Operating Officer at Nationwide, said: “Having Teams in place prior to COVID-19 has ensured we could react to lockdown rules very effectively as we prepared the organisation for new ways of working. Teams has enabled us to convene large groups of people in a way that isn’t possible in a meeting room. It’s not a contingency service for us but something we will continue to build on in the future.”

Leaders who empower their people, places, and processes with digital technology will easily transform their businesses into hybrid workplaces, recover faster, and emerge stronger than those who do not. To build an effective hybrid workplace, organisations need to focus on three things — leadership, culture, and technology.

Leadership

It’s important to have a strategy that enables people to work effectively with colleagues regardless of location. Key to this is a shared purpose and a sense of cohesion. This strategy should be driven from the top and include all teams.

Equip and trust your people to build and use digital capabilities that suit them. Provide support from a mental wellbeing perspective – help people find ways of working and connections that work best for them in this new world of work. AI can be used to help employees make better decisions and focus on higher-value tasks, whilst also boosting inclusivity and sparking creativity.

Culture

Your people are the heartbeat of your business. Leaders must ensure people have the right skills and technology to succeed and the ability to innovate wherever and however they work. They must meet the needs of every individual embracing diversity in all forms. An effective culture gives people not only the means to be productive but the drive to innovate, adapt, and progress.

Support the workplace with technologies that suit remote, office, and frontline workers while keeping them secure. Organisations need an integrated and intelligent approach to security, powered by the cloud and AI. Customer trust is everything. Therefore, ensuring employees have access to the information they need, wherever they are, whilst maintaining security, privacy, and regulatory compliance is vital.

Technology

Key to the hybrid workplace is the right technology platform that allows strategic direction and a strong culture. Microsoft Teams helps organisations give people a single tool to work together no matter where they are, creating a seamless workflow that improves both individual and organisational performance.

Use technology to rebuild and re-imagine process and workflows, breaking up traditional siloes to reconfigure support for how the business and its people now operate. By utilising cloud technologies, firms can gather insights and organise content to identify trends and determine the best course of action in ways that are simply not possible via traditional means. Mott MacDonald is a global engineering, management, and development consultancy that is using cloud technologies to innovate. Their coastal engineering team has been developing a new approach to climate resilience, using flood behaviour predictions as a model simulation for hurricane resilience. Using Azure, they’ve reduced their job completion time and resource costs by 30 percent.

Re-imagine processes and strategies for the hybrid workplace

What excites me the most is the potential we all have to re-imagine business strategies for the long term and create competitive advantage for the future. This is our chance to help the UK as a whole emerge stronger.

I believe this is a great opportunity for organisations to re-imagine the role of the workplace. It will no longer be a traditional desk-based office, but a drop-in place for collaboration and connection. From in-person meetings with customers, to creative workshops and team building exercises. But beyond the makeup of the workplace itself lies the broader opportunity to innovate and re-imagine business processes and strategies.

Hybrid workplace: A springboard for future growth and competitive advantage

When we think about the four elements of digital transformation, we tend to think about empowering employees, optimising operations, transforming products, and engaging customers.

Much of the transformation in recent months has been focussed on empowering employees. But we have a great opportunity to go a step further. To be truly innovative.

“Tech intensity is the key to business resilience. Organisations that build their own digital capability will recover faster.”
– Satya Nadella

The hybrid workplace can deliver innovation at speed

What’s clear is that uncertainty is the new normal. And when we can’t predict we need to get ahead. Remember innovation at speed is not a choice. You need data to create new business models, new distribution channels, and new ways to survive and thrive. This data and your customer’s data needs proactive protection. In this new era of hybrid organisations, you must protect every employee, every device, every network – wherever they are, at all times.

At the heart of the hybrid workplace are your people. And this goes beyond supporting remote work and new safety processes. To sum it up, giving your employees the right skills, tools, and culture can empower your people to be more creative, more productive, and more collaborative, while ensuring no one is left behind.

This opportunity implores us to focus on the things that really matter. It is our chance to reimagine the very essence of the way we work, and the role technology has in creating agile and resilient organisations in the future.

Find out more

Read more: Changing the way we think about remote working

Download the eBook: Four ways to enable the Anywhere Office

Download the report: AI skills in the UK

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

Nick leads the Modern Work and Security business for Microsoft UK and has a passion for helping individuals and organisations to become more productive. Personal and organisational productivity is high on the list for every leader right now; Nick and his team dedicate their working hours to the role that Microsoft technologies can play as part of a business transformation journey.

The post How a hybrid workplace can drive innovation and growth appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.