How to Choose the Best Work Model for Your Team

Remote work has become increasingly popular in the world of business due to the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 for all the right reasons. It offers flexibility and autonomy that employees have rarely experienced in the office. This is why a majority of the remote workforce wants to keep working from home now that the global health threat is under control. 

On the other hand, business owners consider transferring their operations back to the offices, claiming that they can’t maintain working remotely any longer.  However, they can’t demand employees to come back to the office because of the ongoing battle with the pandemic. 

This tricky situation calls for a middle ground solution that has come in the form of a hybrid work model. Hybrid work allows employees to combine office work with working from home and it has become the next big thing in the business world. This article will introduce you to the three most popular working models so that you can choose the one that works best for your employees and your business.

Remote Work Model

As the term suggests, by embracing this work model you’ll allow employees to work remotely, scattered over different time zones, keeping the office space open for specific uses that demand in-person communication, or removing the need for office space entirely.

Numerous business owners who may opt for remote work as their default choice may have quickly recognized that remote work benefits outweigh its challenges. 

For this reason, they’ll encourage employees to work remotely relying on technology to support their virtual workplace. You can start using digital communication and project management platforms, like Google Office, Trello, or employee monitoring tools, such as Workpuls, to provide seamless communication between teams and boost their time management and performance. 

According to some business owners that adopted the remote-first model, offices will be open for collaboration and first-hand company culture experiences rather than solo work. 

In this way, they’ll eliminate the negative sides of remote working like the feeling of isolation and the fear of missing out. Furthermore, remote-first businesses may encourage in-person social interactions by organizing annual retreats for their remote and office employees.

Hybrid Work

If you belong to the group of managers who didn’t get used to fully remote working and advocate the return to the office this hybrid work model may be a solution you’re looking for. This hybrid model allows employees to come and work from the office a couple of days a week, blending collaboration with others with getting the job done.

You can create fixed work-from-office schedules or let your employees choose the days when they’ll work from the office, depending on your company’s needs. For example, if you hold team meetings every Monday, you should make it a mandatory work-from-office day. 

Office occasionally represents a middle ground between remote-first and office-based work that can easily slip into one of these models if you don’t make a clear hybrid work policy, focusing on open communication. 

Try to analyze how often your employees come to the office to work, focusing on their experience. In this way, you’ll see whether this is an optimal work model for your business or not.

Office-Based but Remote Work Allowed

This is a working model most managers favored before the Covid-19 outbreak. Here, the majority of work is done from the office while employees are allowed to work remotely if they want. Even though this may look like a favorable work model, it has significant faults that need to be addressed. 

First, if the entire management works from the office, the rest of the employees will soon follow the lead because they want to stay in touch with everything that’s going on in the office. This means that remote workers may be easily left out from much-needed daily social interactions and collaboration.

What’s more important, by backing up this working model, you may widen the gap between your office-based and remote workers by not providing the same opportunities and connections to everyone. 

This differentiation between employees may lead to serious issues that can affect remote workers’ motivation and engagement and overall company culture.

Final Words

If you want to be the leader of the future, you need to embrace a different work model, combining the office and remote work, hoping to get the best of both worlds. 

We hope that this article will help you make a difference between the most common working models and choose the one that best fits your business and employees’ needs.