Between the movement towards remote and home working due COVID, and businesses aiming to become more sustainable through cutting their carbon emissions and energy consumption, it is clear how relevant the Hybrid Working trend is right now. There are so many IT Support Companies who are making this kind of work more reliable and trusted. In fact, many tech giants have been pivoting their products and services to enable consumers to build hybrid work environments.
If you are perhaps unaware of what hybrid working is – it refers to a system of work that is neither fully remote, nor fully office-bound. The shift to working from home has been a major challenge for some people – either they miss the social aspect of working in an office; or perhaps miss the routine and separation of their work and home life.
On the other hand, many others have thrived during the time they have been working from home, and they appreciate the time they get back due to the lack of commuting, and have felt much more productive in a home-and-work setting. We’ve seen how a Managed Services Provider London businesses trust make this kind of working style easier with the solutions they provide.
The hybrid style of working is meant to provide flexibility to all members of a business – whether they want to work from the office, or from home. Whatever is their most productive work style, a hybrid office should enable it.
But a Hybrid workplace is not just a regular office where some users happen to be working from home; if you want to build a hybrid workplace, your physical office must be equipped with technology that puts all employees – both in and out of office – on the same level.
Hybrid Meeting Rooms
Unfortunately, one of the challenges of hybrid working is the potential for remote workers to be left out of important discussions or on-the-fly meetings held by team members who are in the office. An example of ways this can be mitigated is through intelligent meeting rooms. Having a dedicated meeting room where teams can go to hash out ideas somewhere that won’t disrupt the rest of the office is great for creativity – if you’re looking to create a hybrid workplace, your meeting rooms should be equipped with cameras, speakers, and microphones, so that remote workers can easily be patched in when you get in the meeting room to discuss something; it’s important for that technology to make the process easy, or else remote workers may be left out.
Hot Desks
Another way in which a truly hybrid workspace is built differently is with hot-desking solutions. In a traditional office, everyone had a desk that they also sat at – they might have a few personal effects dotted on the desk or in the drawers; and you can count on always having what you need, because you’re always using the same PC. When looking at IT Support for Accountants as an example, hotdesking needs to be considered carefully but can still work.
However, if your work is perhaps downsizing to a smaller office to build a hybrid workspace, then hotdesking is a much more efficient way of setting up desks – some days you’ll be working at one of these desks, and on other days that you’re working from home, another colleague will use that desk.
There are a lot of technological advancements that can make hotdesking feel more seamless. For instance, the advent of cloud computing means that everything from apps, files, and even full desktops can be shared across multiple devices with internet connections. A business could even equip each hotdesk space with peripheral devices such as docking stations, and additional monitors that users can connect their laptops to – so that every user gets the full desktop experience when they are hotdesking, and don’t feel like they are an afterthought just because they don’t come into the office every day.
