Remote work and hybrid work have become a part of business like never before. Now, if you want to grow, you have to bring in off-site assets and experts to add game value. Any business that is not doing that is losing out and is likely to fail in achieving its goals. But just about any business process planning will not manage to make the most of your remote workers. What you need to do is relook at your entire human resource planning and figure out strategic HRP options. Sounds complicated? No matter.
Fortunately, we looked at the broad global movement and experience with remote work and distilled key insights. We will look at key metrics and strategic human resource planning for hybrid work schedules. Here are some of the biggest ways you can benefit from including remote work in 2024:
Introduction
The verdict is out of remote work – and hybrid work has won! While the prospect of fully remote work is still not viable for most businesses, hybrid work has become a more widely accepted norm. As per Forbes, about 30% of all US workers are now operating on a hybrid work model. The way to achieve this in your organization will revolve around Human Resource Planning at a company-wide level. You do not need to stick with just a basic 30/70 split. You can, in fact, create a much more dynamic and robust working model, combining both hybrid and remote workers and shuffling teams together while maintaining a modest workspace.
The trick to managing all of that is to understand what will really give your business the growth spurt it needs. Most businesses do not want to spend too much money on workspaces now. If they do not use the space, then getting it is definitely a waste. So, the first thing to do is to understand how many personnel you will need in-house during regular working hours all week. After that, you can figure out how to organize your hybrid teams to work in sync with essential personnel or navigate digital workrooms with off-site managers. Once you have that down, consider if expanding your off-site team with remote workers will help. This is a good idea if you are looking to expand your company’s DEI status and also create international co-working.
If all of this seems too hard for you to get in one go, consider this Deloitte optimizing hybrid work doc to get you started.
One of the biggest challenges to working a well-defined hybrid work schedule gets solved with the right strategic Human Resource Planning. What you need is to clearly manage supply lines for all your work processes. This is the easiest handled once you have a centralized working process. Think of it like a planetary system – you have the parent star and planets and the planets have satellites. Your parent star is the company and the planets are your department heads. The satellites are the hybrid/remote workers whom you work with on daily tasks. Assigning them revolving roles and responsibilities such that the team dynamic remains fresh while also encouraging ideas from everyone is the best way to go.
Unfortunately, most hybrid/remote work schedules do not really allow for brainstorming from off-site locations. In fact, this is why hybrid has become more popular over remote since it allows everyone to touch base and rekindle their strategic tie-ups with managers. So, your company probably will do better if its human resource planning accommodates a regular mid-week or alternate days in-office working arrangement. Your human resource planning for remote work must accommodate the needs of your team and come up with a game plan that works with everyone’s process. Ideally, this should also be in line with major workdays or events that are defining your industry. This will give your team enough breathing room as well as power days to work in the office.
Hybrid work schedules are hard to handle without using the right technology and the free stuff is only going to get you so far. What you need is to create a seamless ecosystem that creates opportunities for easy collaboration and also enables more productivity with integrated software options. Mostly, investing in a CRM with hands-on collaboration tools will do the job for you. However, your team may have special needs for which there will be dedicated tools and options. So, exploring these and making them part of your human resource planning strategies is the first step towards harnessing the true power of hybrid mode.
One of the biggest problems that managers are facing nowadays has to do with the sheer workload they have to handle. This has been brought on because of the rapid shift in working processes. As a result, a lot of managers feel overburdened while they juggle hybrid teams, big projects and layoffs. Meanwhile, not having the right kind of tech and software to handle the workflow can really bury your managers and burn them out. So, the best thing to do here is to make your human resource planning work to handle some of the burden. Simply get your strategic human resource planning to create a delegation process and help your managers share the workload. Also, here’s a really helpful guide from Deloitte for your managers to develop a strong remote working process and optimize their productivity all year round.
Anchor days have become something of an insider hot topic for businesses. The premise here is simple – you come up with common days for coming to work and touching base with your peers and team members. This helps in realigning actions and goals and also offers some much-needed face value. For most 20 to 29-year-old working professionals, anchor days define how they are going to rate an enterprise. It is important, therefore, to not just make anchor days about meetings and touch points but also about mentorship and brainstorming.
Anchor days also enable your managers to do people management. This concept involves generating interest in projects using curated growth paths for all your team members. A recent study by McKinsey on hybrid working revealed that employees are feeling anxious about the lack of a clear vision for working. So, using anchor days is a good way to create better synergy as well as motivate workers to give their best when working from home.
As mentioned earlier, mentorship gives workers an extra edge when it comes to working hybrid. The effective definition of how to generate insights and create better company-aligned documents/projects creates more job satisfaction. Further, strategic HRP and other methods enable closer working and more effective implementation of incoming technologies.
As with digital transformation and HR transformation to lead it from behind, using mentorship to orient and adapt new technologies helps workers do better and faster. It also creates greater career momentum and increases productivity. As per this McKinsey podcast featuring Nicholas Bloom, mentoring is vital for hybrid working success but it also becomes more challenging with off days. So, the best solution is to create small mentor groups or teams led by seasoned experts to orient and enable workers towards better performance month on month.
Hybrid work is the future of businesses worldwide. However planning it from the human resource level requires understanding many factors. Things like technology and processes are always vital but what matters more now is the human connection. With the right kind of human resource planning, companies can offset their low productivity risk by a lot. They also stand to gain a lot more talent by hiring offshore and in global markets. The right kind of human resource planning can foresee the needs of their future growth and recruit talent to cater to markets they will enter later. This is one of the more advanced types of human resource planning examples businesses are implementing right now. So, find the right hybrid work HRP strategy and develop your hybrid team to the best of them and your working model.
