Making Hybrid Workplaces More Human

It’s no secret that customers face hurdles when it comes to hybrid workplace models.

Talking to them about technology solutions is important, but does it differentiate you from competitors with similar capabilities and offerings? An ability to recognise, empathise and advise on your customers non-technical challenges can make a difference to building rapport, while gaining more understanding of your customer needs. Here’s our top tips for discovering management headaches, and positioning solutions.

Goal Setting

How do managers in your customers business set goals for their team and each individual contributor? Are the dependencies between the day-to-day tasks of team members transparent? Remote and hybrid working can make it harder for individuals to see where others are dependent on their actions being completed. Tools that can show an overall team plan and the role everyone plays in helping to achieve team goals can help hybrid teams to stay connected, collaborative and focused on the big picture.

Checking In

Behind every laptop filled with unread emails and to-do lists is someone who may be coping well or feeling overwhelmed. Talk to your customer about the systems and processes used to delegate tasks and monitor team progression. Do they have dashboards that can help them spot team members that may be falling behind? Picking up productivity issues can help managers address hidden delivery challenges, reduce burnout, and retain talent.

Contact Overload

Hybrid work has made it more common to chase information down through multiple contact channels. Instead of dropping by someone’s desk to follow up on an ask, chats, SMS, emails and phone calls are used, often in parallel. Being chased across several contact channels at once is a major distraction that can impact productivity and contribute to burnout. Ask if your customer has experienced this, and explore how various solutions can help to limit notifications, alerts and incoming messages during peak productivity periods for their teams.

Access to Information

Finding the right information as quickly as possible is essential. Trawling through folders, email attachments or links shared during chat sessions wastes time, and increases frustration for employees. It’s also important that employees are confident the information they do find is correct. Could your customers benefit from a shared repository for documents or from being shown how to set up simple workflow automations? Explore whether their existing licenses come with value added tools that could help improve the management of documents and access to information for their teams.

Making Hybrid Work Starts with Being Human

Taking a human approach to helping customers with hybrid work headaches starts by stepping back from what is possible with new technology and functionality. Try to slip into their shoes and imagine the kind of non-technical friction points – these are often the real problems they are trying to solve. Start with the problems they need to solve first, and work your way back to the best technical response, and you may discover opportunities that exist for other productivity solutions or services.

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