Top five pro tips for designing agile hybrid workplace

The world has woken up to the new realities of hybrid working for the business benefits and flexibility it offers. Now, organizations need to reimagine their workplace to support on-site and remote employees while keeping them happy and productive. They are looking for new ways of working that strike a balance between flexibility and employee experience and well-being.

To address this market need, Capgemini continues to make significant investments to help clients transform their workplace. Our Connected Employee Experience enables hybrid working by connecting employees with everything they need to execute their job anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Our Leadership position in NelsonHall’s NEAT Evaluation of Advanced Digital Workplace Services  reinforces our commitment to delivering end-to-end holistic workplace solutions.

If you are looking to build a hybrid workplace that focuses on experience and well-being of employees while adapting to constant market changes, here are a few tips:

• Create an experience-centric workplace: Employees now want to be able to access work at office location or at home or on their mobile devices. While designing your workplace strategy, break away from a location-centric model to an experience-centric model. Empower your employees with the right tools and technology that maximize their output at home, in office or on the move. Focus on persona-driven design, gamification, and experience analytics to create an inspiring and engaging workplace.
• Measure employee experience: It is a well-known fact that great employee experience translates into great business results. Understanding employee sentiments helps to uncover inefficiencies and take corrective action. Understand what truly matters to your employees. How do they feel about using IT products and services? Are they happy with the work culture? Establish a XLA( Experience level Agreement)-based approach to measuring employee sentiment that links employee experiences with business outcomes.

Capgemini’s Employee Experience Index  provides accurate assessment of employee sentiment by linking their subjective opinions with IT matrices and KPIs.

• Integrate security into the hybrid workplace: Ensure robust security protocols are in place to ensure safe access to work anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Apply Security policies uniformly across private and office networks. Identity Access Management (IAM) policies must encompass all employees and devices to build digital trust. Set up data governance policies considering country-specific and industry-specific norms.
• Enable collaboration by design: Rethink and redesign the workplace to enable effective collaboration between on-site and remote employees. Our Future-of-work study recommends adapting a “phygital” workplace design to encourage collaboration and learning in a hybrid setup. Reconfigure office spaces to create more meeting rooms and conference areas; virtualize office spaces to enable augmented classroom trainings and webinars. Equip employees with virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing tools for effective participation regardless of location.
• Personalized support: Invest in self-serve capabilities to empower your employees to be productive with a lower support cost. AI-led intelligent support that is context-aware and fits employees’ job role and digital dexterity is an effective way to empower your employees to deliver their best. Strike a balance between on-site support (tech cafes, smart lockers, IT vending machines) and virtual support services (remote video support, smart chat) for a consistent support experience.

Focus on experience, security, and employee well-being while designing a hybrid workplace. When leading the shift to hybrid working, be emphatic towards your employees. Conduct regular meetings to communicate changes. Train your employees to drive digital adoption.

We thank NelsonHall for recognizing us as Leaders in Advanced Digital Workplace Services. You can access the full report here.

If you want to enable hybrid working in your organization, we would be happy to help! Please contact us to explore new options to keep your employees satisfied and productive.

Author

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 Alan Connolly
Global Head of Digital Workplace Services, Cloud Infrastructure Services