Hybrid working is growing in popularity as a replacement for an always-in-the-office approach, with benefits for both employers and employees. But rolling out a hybrid strategy involves some careful consideration to ensure it goes successfully.

From figuring out the best form of hybrid working for your business to choosing a workplace that can meet your hybrid needs, we’re here to provide a complete guide to building a hybrid workplace strategy.

What is hybrid working?

Hybrid working is a flexible working strategy that involves splitting where workers are based throughout the week between a central workplace and other remote locations. 

A hybrid working policy can be configured in diverse ways, from a completely flexible agreement where workers can choose where they work from every day to a formal arrangement that specifies they’re required in the office three days per week, for example.

The idea behind hybrid working is that not every employee needs to be in a central office space all the time, and that they can actually benefit from having the freedom to choose where they work depending on what kind of work they’re doing.

The concept of hybrid working has been around for a long time, but it really hit the mainstream in the aftermath of the pandemic. In fact, research estimates that over 40% of companies in the UK have shifted to a hybrid model post-pandemic, and that only 30% of UK companies now work solely from a central workplace.

That popularity is partly due to the fact that, theoretically, hybrid working offers benefits to both employers and employees. The former get to reduce their office costs, while the latter get more freedom to work in a way that suits them.

However, any business choosing to make the switch to hybrid working needs to consider the impact it’ll have on their workplace strategy.

How hybrid working impacts workplace strategy

A workplace strategy aims to align a business’s way of working with their overall business goals. In other words, it should ensure that a business’s workplace choice is a good fit for what they’re trying to achieve in a broader sense.

While there’s no ‘right’ workplace strategy – given that every company has different objectives and circumstances – there is such thing as a ‘wrong’ workplace strategy. Put simply, if your workplace holds back your business’s ability to achieve its objectives, it’s a problem.

Adopting a hybrid working policy, understandably, has an impact on workplace strategy. It affects diverse factors, including:

• How big a workplace is needed
• How many days a week a workplace is needed
• Whether additional ‘satellite’ workplaces are needed
• What amenities a workplace should provide
• How asynchronous or remote employee communication is handled

Accordingly, businesses moving towards hybrid working will need to revisit their workplace strategy and make adjustments that suit their new way of working. 

How to build a hybrid workplace strategy: Step-by-step

The following step-by-step process will ensure that you’re considering everything as you build your hybrid workplace strategy, increasing the effectiveness of the final product:

1.      Involve your employees

The first step in creating any workplace strategy is to communicate with employees. This is even more true when creating a hybrid workplace strategy, because switching to hybrid working will affect your employees more than anyone else and their thoughts and opinions can be invaluable in deciding what the best approach is.

Involving them in the process can be as simple as sending out a company-wide questionnaire that asks basic questions about how well the current workplace strategy is working, and what could be improved with a hybrid approach. Examples include:

• What works in our current workplace setup?
• What could be improved in our next workplace?
• How many days a week would you like to work in the office?
• What workplace amenities do you use most often?

The answers to these questions can be fed directly into your decision-making process, providing insights that make it easier to determine the best way to handle a hybrid working policy.

2.      Define your hybrid working policy

Before you can properly establish what your hybrid workplace strategy is, you need to decide what configuration of hybrid working you want to adopt. There are lots of potential options, including:

• Remote-first: A remote-first policy involves employees working remotely as the default option with days in the office available on an entirely flexible basis – essentially coming down to whether it’s useful for them on any given day.
• Flexible hybrid: A flexible hybrid policy involves establishing a minimum number of days in the office per employee per week, without specifying what days those should be. This allows employees to choose a set-up that suits them best.
• Fixed hybrid: A fixed hybrid policy is similar to flexible hybrid, but involves establishing set weekly days in the office when all employees are expected to attend. The remainder of the time can be spent working remote.

Each approach has its own unique pros and cons, and which one is best for your business mostly comes down to your objectives. 

If you want to ensure employees can all work together in-person at least once a week, for instance, then a fixed hybrid policy makes most sense. If you want to minimise office costs, a remote-first policy might be a better option.

3.      Determine what role the workplace plays

With at least a semi-formed idea of what your hybrid working policy will look like, you can move on to figuring out exactly what role a workplace plays in facilitating it, and by extension what type of workplace will best fit.

There are two types of workplace that are particularly well-suited to accommodating companies operating on hybrid working policies:

• Coworking space: Coworking spaces allow you to work with maximum flexibility, with membership available on a per-desk basis allowing you to get exactly as many as you need to support hybrid workers.
• Flexible serviced office: A flexible serviced office offers a more private workplace setting, while still preserving some of the flexibility of coworking. You can benefit from unrestrictive short-term leases and scale your space requirements up or down as required.

Depending on what type of hybrid working policy you’ll be using, one of these workplace options (or another alternative) should stand out as making most sense. 

The key to choosing the right one is to consider roughly how many employees per week you’ll need to accommodate in your workplace, and how important it is for the workplace to be private.

4.      Plan for new hybrid-first processes

As a natural byproduct of making the move to hybrid working, you’ll need to reconsider some of the most fundamental processes in your business, like communication and scheduling. 

Take a top-down approach as you build you hybrid workplace strategy to systematically identify what current processes will need to be updated to account for employees being remote.

Key areas to focus on include:

• Seamless and secure file sharing
• Remote 1:1 and company-wide communication channels
• Workplace scheduling or desk booking systems

When you’ve determined where your current processes will be impacted by your hybrid strategy, you can move on to addressing new ways of handling them. Thankfully, there are plenty of technological solutions to solving potential issues raised by hybrid working. 

5.      Make the move with the right workplace

Finally, with your hybrid workplace strategy all figured out, employees on board, and processes refined, you can focus on actually making the move. The final step remaining is to actually choose a workplace that matches your hybrid strategy.

Start by checking out the Boutique Collection, our range of 35+ serviced office and coworking locations across London and beyond. They’re ideal for businesses adopting a hybrid approach because they offer flexibility and scalability that ensure you’ll be able to adapt on the fly, as you figure out your space needs in practice.

And they also contain all of the amenities you need to make a hybrid approach work, including bookable meeting rooms, high-speed WiFi, and more.

If you want to discuss your needs as you pivot towards hybrid, contact us for more information about how our workplaces can provide the solution.

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