As employees around the world begin to return to their offices in one form or another after more than a year of working from home, organizations both big and small are reckoning with the changes their teams have been through. When they left their company offices in March of 2020, no one could have predicted just how big of a cultural shift the transition to remote work would have on just about every industry. Over the past eighteen months of remote work, these employees have unlearned their in-person and on-site professional habits, trading them in for more flexible remote work schedules.

Now, as the return to office fast approaches, companies are welcoming employees back with open arms and more flexible policies to embrace the ways in which they’ve evolved in the months they’ve been working from home. 

52% of people are looking for new jobs in 2021, so employers will be motivated to retain and engage their teams, rather than paying the price of having to recruit, hire, and train new staff. Creating new policies designed to meet returning employees in their new reality, not force them to revert to an old, outdated way of working, will help companies stay relevant and keep employees happy.

To prepare the office for the return of hybrid employees and their new flexible needs, many companies are implementing hyflex policies.

What is a hyflex workplace or team?

Hyflex policies, teams, and spaces are those that combine all of the best attributes of hybrid and flexible systems. Hyflex policies are designed to support the new needs of hybrid employees, such as allowing for them to work on atypical, more flexible schedules.

Hyflex Policies + Schedules

• Holding core hours where employees block off designated times during the day where they are available to their team and other hours where they can do solo, uninterrupted work— a popular schedule choice for 74% of workers.
• A compressed work week where employees fit 40 hours of work into a 4-day schedule, so employees can enjoy more frequent 3-day weekends.
• Daily flexible schedules for employees who often work on projects alone and have very active, flexible lifestyles. Daily flexible schedules are ideal for employees who travel often as part of their Work From Anywhere mindset.

Hyflex teams are those composed of employees working on hybrid and flexible schedules, on any given day these teammates could be working entirely from the office, be scattered across various time zones, or a combination of the two. Rather than having the option to work remotely when needed, or expecting employees to work in the office a certain amount of the time, hyflex work environments are designed to empower autonomy and put the power into the individual’s hands to determine where, when, and how they are the most productive.

With access to technology and communication tools built for hybrid teams, and most teams using cloud-based software at a base level, companies are opening their eyes to the possibilities of unlearning traditional work expectations in favor of modern ways of thinking about what it means to work.

Supporting Hyflex Teams

• Prompt them to hold a high standard for team communication. Inexperienced remote workers who are members of hyflex teams may feel unappreciated or unacknowledged if hybrid team communication best practices aren’t followed.
• Schedule meetings that work for everyone, regardless of where they are located. Consider allowing hyflex teams to enact meeting-free days— 80% of employees agree that there should be at least one day a week with no meetings at all— and trust that they know when meetings are necessary and when an email will do the trick instead. 
• Invest in synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration tools, so distributed teams can work at their own paces without disrupting the flow of their teammates.

Hyflex spaces are workplaces that have been wired to support hybrid teams and their new hybrid collaboration teams.

Hyflex-Friendly Spaces

• Streaming rooms that are equipped with a monitor and wired with a video conferencing platform for impromptu hybrid team meetings, an especially useful tool for in-office employees who have many remote teammates.
• Video conferencing phone booths or huddle rooms for 1:1 hybrid meetings, small team meetings, private solo work, and quick brainstorming sessions.
• Tech rental stations that offer a selection of the most common tech tools so hybrid workers who don’t commute to the office very often don’t have to lug all of their tech with them when they come in for the day.
  
  

Why does it benefit businesses to implement hyflex policies?

When businesses implement hyflex policies they are setting themselves up for the future and acknowledging the new realities that follow a year plus of remote work. Hyflex policies make for more productive and engaged employees, and they also make for happier employees who are more likely to stick around for the long term.

The hard truth is if employers are unable to provide for their new, hyper-flexible and adaptable employees then they run the risk of losing them to competing companies that will (this is already happening). There are many reasons why you don’t want to begin losing employees left and right to organizations with more progressive policies. These losses will have an effect on company culture and productivity, but it has also never been more expensive to hire, onboard, and train new employees to replace the ones you’ve lost. 

It takes anywhere from 8 to 26 weeks to bring a new employee completely up to speed, depending on the unique responsibilities of their job. During this time, the average company will lose between 1% and 2.5% of its total revenue. Those percentages aren’t particularly scary when you think of them that way, but they quickly add up. Ultimately, replacing an employee can cost up to 50-60% of the onboarded employee's salary. For companies experiencing higher turnover rates, these numbers can quickly add up to cost 90-200% of their salaries.

While it’s hard to find the exact cost of hiring replacement employees, studies have found that hiring an employee in a company with 0-500 employees costs an average of $7,645.

Ultimately, it is in the better interest of companies of all sizes to focus their efforts on retaining their current employees than onboarding new ones. 

This is not a new phenomenon, companies have always had to learn how to adapt to new employee expectations and needs. But what the world is experiencing now is one of the greatest cultural shifts we’ve ever seen. In March 2020 when the great remote work migration began, companies had a far simpler time adjusting to their new, distanced reality because it was a government-mandated policy enacted to keep everyone safe and healthy. Now, on the other side of that migration, there is no hard and fast regulation for how to return to the office. Instead, organizations are left to decide for themselves what this return will look and feel like to their teams.

The best way to make the transition back into the office one that is supportive of your employee’s evolved needs is to find out what your individual team or direct reports expect and want. No one is a better expert on the lived experience of the modern employee than the employees themselves. To enact hybrid change at your company that is sustainable and truly supportive of your workforce, start the process by including remote, hybrid, and flexible employees in the conversation around hyflex policies.

While no one can prepare you for the conversation that unfolds or the exact policies that your teams will determine to be the best suited to support their new work-life balances, I can give you a hint. With 77% of full-time workers agreeing that after COVID-19 having the option to work from home would make them happier, it’s clear that hybrid work is here to stay and hyflex policies are the future of work.

What’s next for workplace expectations?

Outside of the standard hyflex policies and workplace changes mentioned above, what else does the future of work hold? Over the past year, employees who were working from home learned a lot about themselves. They learned which conditions made them a more productive employee, they learned which work schedules made them happier employees, and most importantly they learned what they do and do not expect from a workplace.

While COVID-19 put the emphasis on employers to create more hyflex workplace policies to allow for more individual freedom and flexible lifestyle for their employees, new employee expectations don’t stop there. Even before the pandemic changed the way we work more hyflex workplace expectations were beginning to emerge across industries, such as:

• Unlimited vacation days— one of the most popular employee benefits to emerge in recent years (1 out of 3 employees would give up some of their salaries to get unlimited vacation time), unlimited vacation policies are still feared by companies worried that their teams would abuse such a relaxed policy. But studies have shown the opposite to be true, with most employees with unlimited vacation days only 2–3 weeks off every year and 5% not taking any time off at all.
• Childcare support— one of the most glaring issues highlighted by the pandemic was the lack of professional childcare support offered to working parents, primarily working mothers. This past year, women’s unemployment rates were 2.9% higher than men, due in large part to the fact that when childcare stopped being supplied during stay-at-home orders in 2020 it was mostly women who left their jobs in order to support their children. To better retain working parents, companies should start re-examining their benefits to offer childcare subsidies and more progressive maternity, paternity, and adoption leaves.

To create a workplace that is as flexible and hybrid as the employees who use it, begin implementing hyflex policies today. But the work doesn’t stop there, here's how to develop an inclusive workplace from culture to accessibility.