With many organizations adopting hybrid work in the post-pandemic world, hybrid work optimization will continue to be a key trend in 2023. Our expert Marcus Ruyle discusses this trend in the latest episode of Valorem Visions.

Transcript

The trend we're seeing is really around Hybrid Work Optimization. So, you know, coming out of COVID, a lot of companies started to move back to the office and tried to decide what the policy they were going to have. You know, is everybody back? Half the people back certain days? But whatever that policy has been, there's been challenges around it. Other than a couple of industries like financial services, healthcare, where it's a little less prevalent because kind of everybody's back. This has been on the minds of CEO, CIOs, and so how do they make sure that when their employees are in the office, that they're having really meaningful, in-person interactions and meetings with the people that they work with and on their teams? And then if people are away from the office, how do they make sure that they're not feeling disconnected? And so really that's been a trend in terms of really addressing that through various employee experience programs.

What we're seeing and you know we're working with a lot of customers right now on solutions to this problem and what we're hearing is that coming out of COVID, there was a lot of stress that were put on employees. Working from home was difficult for many individuals, you know, employee retention has been an issue, especially in certain industries with people leaving and moving around and they want to make sure that their employees are happy, functioning efficiently, and are still feeling connected. A lot of the retention issues that companies have been experiencing has really been attributed to the fact that their employees don't feel as connected like just fully working from home to their company and so they're less loyal and more likely to go look around and leave. And so, a lot of research has been done to show that having meaningful in-person conversations with the people that you work for and with are really important to making you feel connected to your company, making sure your company culture is staying intact, and ultimately driving better retention and better employee satisfaction. And so that's really why it's so important.

We have a couple of initiatives right now in Hybrid Work. They're both kind of connected to each other. The first is around an application called Converge. This application is a collaborative app that's loaded inside of Teams and it allows your employees to see who on their team is going to be in the office when and just click a simple button to set up a meeting for the people that are remote, they can see people that are close to their zip code and it uses Bing Maps and Yelp Fusion to allow them to pick a location like a Starbucks or a city park to meet in person, even off-site. And then it also has a meeting room, Airbnb type of functionality that allows companies to promote a lot of the fancy new meeting rooms that they put in during COVID with pictures and amenities to encourage them to come in and enjoy these nice new spaces. And so this application can be delivered in just a couple weeks, two to three weeks out-of-the-box. And then we work at bringing our change management folks and we stick around to optimize it to make sure that they’re using it to the best of their abilities and they could be getting the most out of it.