Most companies haven’t fully embraced an organized, structured hybrid work model just yet. Our latest research shows that most organizations, especially in the technology sector, still utilize fully flexible schedules, which has benefits; however, we see clearly that it has a lot of challenges too.
Organizations, small and large, are re-evaluating options for more structured hybrid work models.
The technology you choose is the most essential element of organizing your hybrid work policy. Return to office software (also known as hybrid work software) is vital to achieving high adoption, better employee engagement, and clarity about the process.
Based on our experience working with hundreds of flexible companies worldwide, we created a complete requirements list to help you structure the process of choosing the right software. You can also download our excel RFP file for free or open it as a Google sheet (for that, you will need to make a copy of the file after logging in with your Gmail account).
Starting with the most important part – employees should be able to book hot desks easily on a visual office map. Following is our list of very common hot desk booking requirements:
Note: For more ideas on improving your hot desk management processes – read our extensive piece here.
The next section is about nurturing collaboration and helping bring your hybrid teams together in the office. You should look for various features and options that can boost collaboration within and between teams or enforce more specific and structured rules that employees should follow. Following is our list of collaboration features:
Next to reserving a desk is the ability to easily book a meeting or conference room. Returning to the office should be about collaboration, brainstorming, and co-creating customer value. Booking meeting spaces should be simple and easy yet powerful to allow for the more complex scenarios of a modern organization.
Note: Read our guidelines for better meeting room management here.
All features should be available on the web and mobile. This is the most common expectation from your return to office software. However, you should also add to your requirements list a deep platform integration with Microsoft, Google, or Slack:
Integrating your hybrid work software with your tech stack will ensure better employee engagement and satisfaction. Our research points out that companies that fully integrate their platform of choice achieve much better product adoption.
Although advanced presence tracking is not key to successfully implementing hybrid work, it’s important to understand better how your workplaces are used. Following is our list of basic presence tracking features:
The most important element of presence tracking is to collect all available data so that you can further analyze it to polish your hybrid work policy.
The modern return-to-office software focuses on your employees. Unlike the previous generation of IWMS systems, the new hybrid work solutions extensively focus on the experience. However, space management is still crucial to successfully adopting hybrid work models.
Space management is a huge topic and a wide range of functionality might be available in different systems. We will leave it up to you to decide how deep space management capabilities you need.
As a facility manager, you know how hard it is to always be on top of the issues in every workplace. Dealing with issues is hard. The software part of it shouldn’t be hard, though. You should find the balance of simplicity and advanced features:
Ticket management systems can be as advanced as you can imagine. For the most part, you should look for how easy it is for employees to submit tickets. Then, the tickets can freely flow into more advanced systems if you already use one.
The essence of visitor management is to welcome guests, right? That’s easy. There are a lot of apps that do that. Most return-to-office software platforms will include visitor management too. Here’s the list of basic features to look for;
As noted, and more importantly, the system should integrate natively with your existing visitor management system.
Security and compliance are one of the most critical elements of your new return-to-office technology. There are a number of recent cases where popular systems were breached and employee data leaked. As scary as this is, certain checks can help you mitigate the risks associated with data leaks.
Although knowing how secure a system is hard, you must check the provider’s security pages extensively. You can also ask when the last penetration test they underwent was and demand access to the results. If you have a budget, you can also ask to do penetration testing yourself.
Workplace analytics is a huge topic. You can go wild here. Your expectations for analytics can be as big as your imagination is. There’s so much valuable data in good workplace management software! Here’s our list to start, but as noted, go wild and add all the awesome insights you need to make data-driven decisions:
Note: Learn more on how you can cut costs by up to 40% by better understanding your workplace.
Flexible working is here to stay! The only way forward is to adapt and utilize great technology to help you navigate the ever-changing world of how we work and help you craft the future of work for your organization.
Technology can play a key role in helping you in this transition and ensure higher office occupancy, better collaboration, and happier and more engaged employees!
Get our free RFP template for hybrid work software here.
If you’re looking for free desk booking software, then check out OfficeRnD Hybrid.
OfficeRnD introduces the first complete hybrid work solution and it's free of charge!
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