“As we continue our voyage back into the post-pandemic working world, hybrid work and more specifically hybrid collaboration reign supreme in supporting employee health while maximizing organizational growth.” Says Connie Testa, CSS TEC Managing Director.
Hybrid work digs its roots after two years of whirlwind employment
The shockwave sent through the working world by 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic left heavy scars on communities across the globe including workforces across all industries and sectors. Work-life balance revolutionized as employees proved more productive working from home.
However, as much as we love our morning coffee with our pets by our sides in a bathrobe with a meeting camera turned off, full remote work still left lacked key collaboration aspects of working in-person which birthed the hybrid work system.
Recent research suggests that 75 percent of workers in tech and adjacent industries currently work on a hybrid schedule working anywhere from one to four days at home with the rest in-office. With this new working paradigm in mind, let’s dive deeper into the forms and benefits of hybrid communication.
The best of both worlds? How hybrid communication maximizes efficiency and creativity at work
Our collective shift to full remoteness during the height of the pandemic illuminated productivity and efficiency that major corporations didn’t expect from our work from home warriors. We personalized our offices and workspaces to the max and excelled during the times we know we work the hardest as opposed to adhering to a strict 9-5 schedule.
Organizations and employees saved time and money eliminating commutes, travel, physical office costs, and more when moving remote. However, as we collected a larger sample size of work over the past two years, remote work revealed deficiencies only in-person collaboration could solve. Studies revealed that intrateam creativity declined precipitately from in-person collaboration to meeting virtually.
Hybrid collaboration maintains cost saving strategies like decreased travel and work efficiency while solving this creativity issue by drawing employees into office spaces a few days per week for face-to-face collaboration.
Tools of the trade: the best applications and systems
Hybrid communication and collaboration, if implemented correctly, offers flexibility and holistic platform usage for all employees on every team. A native cloud infrastructure is paramount, and systems should be easily accessible via. laptop, tablet, and mobile methods to ensure agile teamwork between those in-office and remote workers.
Hybrid office kit technology offer features like automatic transcription of dialogue for those in and out of the office as well as smart conference room camera biometric tracking which readies any specific employee’s preferred presentation application pre-meeting.
For more tools and applications catered to your hybrid collaboration success, follow this link and explore the best offerings in the business.
Shifting from CapEx to OpEx focus
A quick note on hybrid work’s impact on capital expenditures and operating expenses; we’ve seen expense specification at touch-and-go rates rise while overarching capital spending drop with the many hybrid office kits being offered on the market. This burgeoning sector known as collaboration as a service, or CaaS, focuses in specifically on communication and collaboration needs catered toward remote and hybrid work further entrenching workplace flexibility as the new workforce standard.
The emergence of audio importance
Video calls set the standard for remote and hybrid work, but these meetings are nothing without quality audio for both speakers and listeners. After two-plus years of web video conferences, employees are experiencing “video fatigue,” or watching oneself without the ability to move around your space while on a meeting.
Intelligible, clear audio is a key element of hybrid meetings, especially as more and more cameras are switched off due to video fatigue. Make sure your organization prioritizes top audio quality and sound acoustics in-office and an agile devops team dedicated to your remote employee audio success.
About CSS Tec:
CSS Tec provides staffing solutions for employers across a variety of industries nationwide. Our unwavering commitment to quality, flexible delivery models, and ability to be process adept has positioned us among the leaders in the IT Staffing Industry. Our tenured team of Recruiters are committed to finding highly skilled resources dedicated to the technology domain.