Creating and operating a hybrid workplace presents a range of challenges, such as occupancy planning, coordinating schedules, and ensuring employees can locate co-workers and know when and where to come-in to collaborate effectively. Hybrid workplace software, featuring interactive floor plans, can help with these challenges and cut the complexity involved in trying to manage the process using countless spreadsheets and calendars.
While it may be tempting to simply find a solution and hope that employees adopt it as part of their routine, you should take time to consider these six factors before selecting and implementing such a system in your organization.
Visibility: Employees should be able to find each other quickly and easily, whether they're regulars in the office, visitors from another location, new team members, or even clients coming by with questions. No matter how well you design your workplace, if employees don’t know where everything is, they’ll never truly be engaged with it. Keep in mind that offices are about more than just desks; people might be using them for socializing, meeting with customers, or even exercising and taking breaks from their usual routine, so providing information on resources and amenities is also helpful.
Efficiency: Regardless of where they're working from - home or office - every employee should be able to access the system quickly, easily, and in real time. Once in, they should be able to find schedule information or take actions with minimal effort, and then move on with their day. The faster that information is exchanged and objectives accomplished, the higher your employee engagement levels will be. If it's not efficient for them, chances are they won't use it.
Usefulness: When employees need to find their way around a workplace, floor plans should be available and easy to view and interact with on desktop and mobile devices. Finding people, locations, and amenities should be possible from a single interface, with intelligent searching to narrow down what they’re looking for. It’s vital that employees see the software as something that can be used daily and will make them more efficient. An interactive floor plan feature should be easy enough for anyone in your organization to navigate without training or instructions.
Informative: Your employees need quick access to information when they're trying to make decisions about scheduling meetings and catching up with co-workers. An effective interactive plan provides employees, both virtual and in-office, visibility into their workplaces. And, with a transparent and comprehensive floor plan, companies can make informed decisions about how best to implement their office space.
Feedback: Hybrid office rollouts should involve a feedback loop. Progress is measured and analyzed so you can continue moving forward and refine your hybrid strategy. Hybrid workplace software should provide you with valuable insight into what is working, what isn’t, and how you can take actions to improve.
Collaboration: Involving multiple individuals in maintaining your hybrid workplace strategy is more efficient and sustainable, and results in a more complete picture of the office. HR, IT, and facilities may all have different objectives, but it is likely that employees will want all this information, easily accessible, and current. Collaboration features, version control, and scenario functionality become essential to enabling people from multiple areas to combine their knowledge and efforts to create the best plans possible.
