An effective hybrid workplace strategy helps you achieve organizational goals by bringing more intentional purpose to your workplace requirements. Hybrid work presents an opportunity to reduce real estate costs, decrease turnover, and increase employee satisfaction, all without inhibiting productivity. But these benefits aren’t guaranteed. A failing strategy can inhibit your ability to reach these goals.
Even the most thoughtful approaches to hybrid work can fall short of expectations. Whether you carefully planned your hybrid workplace strategy from the beginning, or it formed haphazardly over time, your approach may need to change before you can get the most from it.In this article, we’ll discuss signs your hybrid work strategy isn’t working, reasons why some strategies fail, and ways to get yours back on track.
Signs your hybrid workplace strategy isn’t working
Right now, you may not know where your strategy went wrong. But you’ve probably noticed frustrating symptoms of a larger problem. Your hybrid work strategy may be directly causing organizational issues, or contributing to them in ways you haven’t realized. Here are some of the most common signs that it’s time to adjust your hybrid workplace strategy.
You’re struggling to rightsize your real estate portfolio
One of the main reasons organizations implement hybrid work is to downsize their portfolios. Fewer people in the office should mean you need less space. You can close or sublet floors, consolidate offices, or terminate leases to lower your operating costs.
But hybrid work also inherently creates variable demand for space. Your hybrid work schedule and policy will influence how many people are in the office in a given day, but the more flexibility you offer employees, the more unpredictable demand for space becomes. Throughout the week, or even the workday, there may be large fluctuations in the number of people in the office or the types of space and resources workers want to access.
That makes real estate decisions difficult. You don’t want to close locations or rent out space only to find you actually need it sometimes. And you don’t want to acquire space you only need on certain days or during peaks. It’s frustrating to see significant square footage sit unoccupied, and just as frustrating to see congestion interfering with operations.
This struggle to rightsize your portfolio is a reflection of your organization’s inability to predict and control demand, and it’s a telltale sign that there are holes in your hybrid work strategy.
Employees don’t have the office space and resources they need
As office-based organizations have adjusted their remote work policies over the years, they’ve often encountered a problem: there’s not enough space for people to work. Too few desks. No WiFi. Not enough meeting rooms. These issues are most pronounced when a company enforces a return-to-office mandate that drastically increases the number of people in the office—but they’re also common challenges for organizations with poor hybrid work strategies.
Lack of space and resources can be the result of an organization reducing square footage too drastically. But more broadly, it’s an indicator that you’re having trouble matching the availability of office resources with demand. You may actually have everything employees need, but you haven’t distributed demand properly (through your hybrid work schedule) or planned well enough for peak occupancy hours (with reconfigurable spaces and proactive communication about availability).
This often comes down to a visibility problem. You aren’t adequately tracking space utilization and reallocating space to fit patterns in demand. It’s also possible that there’s another issue at play: permissions. If a single person can book a meeting room for themself when there aren’t quiet workstations available, that room isn’t being used for its intended purpose, and groups that need to meet have fewer options.
Productivity has decreased
Lagging productivity can have many causes, but some may be related to your hybrid work strategy. If employees aren’t actively complaining about a lack of space or resources, you may not notice that they don’t have what they need to be effective until productivity starts to fall behind. Instead of complaining, they may see your lack of preparation as an excuse to take it easy or change their priorities, causing projects to be delayed due to logistical challenges of your hybrid workplace. It doesn’t even have to be deliberate: if there’s no available meeting room when people need it, they may simply postpone an important meeting until the space is available instead of finding an alternative solution.
A poor hybrid work strategy could also impact morale and productivity. A restrictive hybrid work schedule that gives employees little autonomy to choose where and how they work could make them feel less motivated or engaged. Showing up to an underutilized office can have a similar effect—especially if company culture, community, or collaboration have been key reasons for requiring time in the office. Some people will be frustrated if they commute to an office and then meet with colleagues virtually.
It’s difficult for employees to collaborate
Collaboration is related to productivity and access to office resources, but it also requires employees to coordinate. Your hybrid work schedule may require teams or departments to be in the office on the same days, or it may not. But even if it does, there will be times when people need to meet with colleagues in different roles—do your policies, technologies, and processes make it difficult to swap days under special circumstances?
Flexible schedules can have problems here, too, as employees with full autonomy need to know when key coworkers are in the office so they can coordinate their reservations together. If it’s difficult to find time and space to work with colleagues, your hybrid work strategy may be interfering with your goals.
Turnover is too high
Hybrid work has been shown to improve retention for a variety of reasons, including reducing the burden of commutes, decreasing the frequency of discrimination, and fostering greater work-life balance. While many factors contribute to turnover, a higher-than-average turnover rate at a hybrid organization could indicate a problem with implementation. A hybrid strategy that inhibits productivity, makes collaboration difficult, undervalues remote work, or unnecessarily limits flexibility could motivate workers to leave the company.
Effective hybrid work strategies empower employees to choose where and how they work and enable them to be equally successful from home or the office. If your hybrid work policy doesn’t provide the benefits of hybrid work to employees, they may seek another organization that does.
Now let’s talk about how to treat these symptoms by addressing the underlying problem: a failing hybrid work strategy.
How to fix your hybrid workplace strategy
Many of the warning signs we’ve discussed are complex issues that can have multiple causes. And there may be multiple aspects of your hybrid work strategy that need adjusting. Thankfully, the solutions are a lot more straightforward. Each of the remedies to breakdowns in your strategy involve initiating or modifying processes, policies, and technology that enable a hybrid workplace. These may have been oversights from the beginning, or areas that simply need to be developed as your strategy matures.
Improve visibility into occupancy
Occupancy tracking is often lacking (or poorly utilized) in organizations that struggle with hybrid work. It’s impossible to satisfy demand for space if you can’t measure it. You can’t rightsize your portfolio or meet employees’ needs without reliable visibility into occupancy—and by extension, space utilization.
Most enterprises primarily rely on badge scanning and/or desk booking software to track occupancy levels. This can work fairly well for high-level real estate decisions, but it also leaves visibility gaps that can impact employee productivity and satisfaction. You may have enough space on paper, but not the right space allocation in practice. A good hybrid work strategy needs both. And that requires more granular visibility into occupancy.
Badge scans give a rough picture of the number of people entering and exiting a building throughout the day, and reservation data lets you see how much time various spaces are booked. But neither shows the number of people in a room or tracks non-reservable spaces, including permanently assigned workstations or offices. Some office reservation software can’t even prove someone was in a reserved space at their scheduled time, which means if someone doesn’t show up, the space is unoccupied and unreservable.
Closing these visibility gaps with more sophisticated technology like space utilization sensors or a network-based occupancy monitoring system is the first step to assess, validate, and/or adjust your hybrid work strategy.
Evaluate how your space is being used
Data collection is only the first part of the process. Occupancy analytics is how you contextualize that data and optimize your space around your people and operations. It’s an essential practice for any hybrid org: without occupancy analytics, you’ll struggle to make informed real estate decisions and ensure workers have access to the things they need.
Is there consistently underutilized space in your workplace? Spaces with exceedingly high peak occupancy levels? What specifically do you need more or less of? Your hybrid work strategy has to include a process for periodically evaluating whether your space is being used effectively. And that can only happen when your occupancy data is centralized into a single source of truth, where you can analyze historical patterns, forecast future demand, and ideally, explore occupancy data in real time.
Occupancy analytics also empowers you to redistribute demand for space through proactive communication. If certain spaces are consistently unavailable on particular days or at specific times, administrators or leadership staff can highlight alternative spaces that meet similar needs, or days and times these popular spaces are more accessible. Real-time data makes this particularly helpful on special occasions like conferences, training sessions, hackathons, and other special events that put greater strain on workplace resources.
Take a clear look at your approach to occupancy analytics. Do you have a well-developed, established process for evaluating and responding to space utilization? That has to be a core component of your hybrid work strategy, or else you’ll continually struggle to meet ongoing and emerging needs.
Establish clear feedback loops
Occupancy tracking and analytics show how your space is being used—but not how people feel about it. The next place to evaluate in your hybrid workplace is employee sentiment, which often reveals problems you aren’t seeing in the analysis.
Perhaps the space people need is available, but the process of reserving parking, lockers, neighborhoods, and meeting rooms is cumbersome. Or it’s difficult to coordinate time in the office with colleagues, and team members often find themselves working in separate spaces. Maybe employees feel like the commute to the office isn’t worth it, and they’d be happier using a coworking space. Or what if hot desking was part of your plan to increase flexibility, but most employees feel that not having an assigned workstation makes it difficult to establish a rhythm at work.
Employee feedback can also help you understand preferences. Why is that one meeting room so popular? How come no one uses these desks? What types of work do people prefer to do on their days in the office? Would certain changes make other workstations and spaces more desirable, or give people more options that meet their needs?
If you’re not getting what you want from your hybrid work strategy or you’re planning changes, doing a round of internal research to gather feedback will help identify specific problems. But you should also implement a regular feedback loop to spot issues before they create larger problems and ensure your strategy maximizes productivity, engagement, and satisfaction.
Assess your progress toward goals
Improving your strategy looks different depending on your goals. You need to honestly evaluate how your strategy has been working so far based on what you intend it to accomplish.
Did you have an organizational goal to reduce your real estate footprint by a percentage, or to consolidate your portfolio into fewer locations? Was your strategy part of a plan to increase employee satisfaction and engagement? Or to reduce turnover? How has hybrid work fit into other goals relating to your company culture?
Your hybrid work strategy certainly isn’t the only contributor to these goals, but there is a relationship, so it’s important to consider where you’re on track, progressing too slowly, or moving in the wrong direction. This helps focus your attention on the parts of your strategy that actually need to change, and recognize policies and practices that may be salvageable.
Perhaps you’ve made enough reductions to satisfy real estate goals, but your operations experience more frequent disruptions, or employee engagement has taken a hit. Or maybe everyone is happy with your approach to hybrid work, but you haven’t made sufficient progress toward downsizing your portfolio.
Evaluating progress toward goals that hybrid work impacts shows you where to look for the underlying issues in your strategy.
Identify the root problem(s)
You may know what your hybrid work strategy is failing to accomplish for your organization, but not why it’s falling short. Bolstering your occupancy tracking technologies and solidifying feedback loops gives your organization the investigative capabilities needed to uncover the true problems with your strategy—so you know what to change.
If you haven’t been able to reach your real estate goals, you may need to adjust your hybrid schedules and require fewer days in the office, or to find underutilized space. Either of these processes can open the door to new consolidation opportunities or create pathways to reduce square footage without impacting operations.
But which is the core problem: undiscovered wasted space, or too many occupants?
Start by analyzing space utilization data. If you already have significant underutilized space, requiring fewer days in the office will create more underutilized space, but it won’t show you which space you can afford to get rid of, or how much extra space you have. If there’s not a significant amount of underutilized space, and you haven’t been able to meet real estate goals, you’ll need to reduce occupants, which means requiring fewer days in the office, more evenly distributing occupants throughout the week, or softening your eligibility requirements for hybrid work, allowing more employees to work from home.
If employee satisfaction, engagement, or turnover aren’t at desired levels, employee surveys, focus groups, or interviews will help evaluate which aspects of your strategy—such as your schedule, eligibility, autonomy, reservation process, or availability of space—are having the most detrimental impact on employee wellbeing.
You can certainly explore engagement issues through utilization data, but you’ll have to rely on inferences and assumptions to draw conclusions, and some aspects of these issues are rooted in employees’ preferences and personal experiences. You might see overbooked meeting rooms as a signal for more, while they might see inadequate team workspaces or private workstations. You might see evenly distributed occupancy levels as a sign that the strategy is working, when employees feel like their time in the office isn’t valuable because the people they need to work with are in the office on different days, or in different spaces.
Aggregate employee feedback coupled with utilization data puts a spotlight on the issues with your strategy, so you can explore the changes that could put your goals back on track.
Realign your strategy with your goals
When you initially defined your hybrid work model and established your strategy, it probably seemed like the right path to achieve your desired outcomes. But that didn’t pan out. And now you know why.
Here are some of the components of your strategy that you may need to adjust in order to bring your strategy back in line with your goals, as well as the types of adjustments that address common problems with a hybrid strategy.
Hybrid work policy
- Loosen eligibility requirements for hybrid work to lower occupancy levels, or tighten them to have the opposite effect.
- Establish minimum group sizes for spaces intended for group work to prevent these spaces from being misused as private workstations.
- Define a check-in process to ensure employees show up to spaces they’ve reserved, so unoccupied spaces aren’t unusable to others when there’s a “no show.”
- Give hybrid employees stipends to choose a coworking space near them, or establish coworking spaces closer to where employees live in order to increase engagement and satisfaction. Or, remove coworking spaces from your policy to promote in-office collaboration.
- Ensure that your policy places equal value on working remotely and working from the office, with clear guidelines for how to be inclusive of remote workers during in-person events and benefits.
Hybrid work schedule
- Change the number of required days in the office to adjust occupancy levels, engagement, or satisfaction.
- Require teams or departments to be in the office on the same days to make collaboration easier. Ideally, configure your reservation system to recommend reservations based on colleagues’ schedules.
Office layout
- Adjust your space allocation to meet demand for space, increasing productivity and satisfaction while making more efficient use of your square footage.
- Close off underutilized spaces to reduce utility costs and test the impact on operations. If the impact is negligible, sublease the extra space, or consolidate offices to reduce overall footprint.
Some of these changes may conflict with other intentions or expectations your leadership has had regarding hybrid work, particularly if they’ve been resistant to the model, and the problems with your strategy now call for it to be more flexible or shift emphasis away from working in the office. But hybrid work is a model your organization can use to support a number of larger goals. If those goals are important to your organization’s long-term success, it’s worth making the strategic adjustments to reach them.
Perfect your hybrid work strategy with Tango
If your hybrid work strategy isn’t working, it’s time to change your approach. But you may need some new capabilities first.
An effective hybrid workplace strategy requires a wide range of real estate management technologies—and Tango has them all. Comprehensive reservation software to fine-tune access to shared office resources. Space management software to test new scenarios and discover the floor plans that best align with goals. Occupancy analytics software with holistic visibility into how your office is being used—so you can find underutilized space, identify problem areas, and predict future demand. And specialized strategic solutions for exploring how changes to your strategy affect turnover, occupancy levels, and your entire portfolio.
Want to see what Tango can do for you?
Request a demo today.
