Last Updated on August 24, 2022 by user
The pressure was on every HR team during the pandemic to quickly adapt to employees working remotely and now having to re-adjust to either returning to the office or adopting a hybrid approach.
Not to mention the fresh wave of changing needs and demands of employees in order to retain your best talent and ensure your workforce is engaged, happy and productive. “Companies with healthy work cultures provided three times more returns to shareholders during the pandemic,” according to McKinsey. But, the question on every HR managers’ lips is, how do you maintain the culture of your organization, deliver a world class employee experience so your profit margins don’t decline?
Here are our top tips to building a robust culture in a hybrid work model
- Embrace technology to fuel employees innovation
There is nothing more frustrating for employers and employees than not having the right systems in place to connect with their colleagues, store and share information or even have the level of transparent communication needed to do their jobs. Deploy innovation hubs across your business where teams can share ideas, managers can review them and guide them to execution. Once employees can easily connect with each other and with managers, they are more open to share suggestions and receive feedback.
- Ensure you have a shared purpose
Every company has a vision and mission. Now it’s time to see that your employees have a shared purpose in achieving their personal goals, their teams’ goals and ultimately your company’s objectives. This can be challenging when you have new employees joining the workforce and a vital step towards ensuring they feel a part of the team and are clear on their roles within it. Get your employees on the same page by mapping out their career paths, providing consistent feedback and tracking their progress. You could do this by having a performance management system in place.
- Consider your employee benefits
Take an honest look at the benefits your organization currently offers its employees. In a hybrid model most are already benefiting from potentially flexible hours and the savings on ever rising fuel expenses. A survey to our Bayzat work life platform users revealed that fuel claim expenses have increased by 38% over the past 6 months. Now dig a little deeper, do your employee benefits resonate with your employees or is there more you could be offering such as easy access to medical insurance, wellness programmes or even discounts from retail outlets? Everybody loves added extras and a little appreciation sometimes goes a long way – even in a corporate environment.
- Instill a culture of trust
For any remote or hybrid working model to be successful, you need to instill a culture of trust. By giving employees control of their work schedules, you are giving them a certain amount of trust to get their jobs done. Trust goes beyond tracking your employees and their tasks. It also works the other way – an employee has to trust in their managers and organization. In fact, a recent Middle East Hopes & Fears Survey revealed “71% of regional respondents stressed the importance of transparency by employers around their workplace health and safety, diversity and inclusion and economic and environmental impacts.” So keep your lines of communication open.
The most important thing to remember is that building and maintaining your company culture in a hybrid model takes intentional effort. We know this adds to any HR managers’ plate, but there are a few tricks you could use to automate your processes as much as possible, so you can get back to the part you love the most – your people. Bayzat’s HR and Employee benefits platform can give you the ability to offer employees:
- Access to benefits that typically only larger organizations could offer. At a very low cost to your SME.
- The ability to view their payslips, employee records, manage their letter requests and automate their expense claims from their mobile devices
- Have a clear understanding of their performance on a daily, weekly or quarterly basis.
Contact us today for a free demo!