Organisations are struggling hard to get the employees back to offices and are experimenting with several benefits to do the same. The flexibility offered by remote work has become a crucial priority for the employees. But are all the companies future-ready to operate on a hybrid basis?

TeamLease has conducted a survey to find out whether businesses are ready enough to adopt a hybrid work model.  The survey titled “Future-readiness of organisations for a Hybrid World’ found that 58% of responding organisations think 2022 is the year offices will become completely in-office. 

Findings state that in a remote work environment performance management is a challenge for 40% of the employees. Additionally, although 43.46% of HR leaders conceded that their employees want to return to work, 76.78% of organisations said they will give their employees the preference to choose their work model. 

TeamLease noted in the official statement that as far as the state of workspaces goes, 36.61% of respondents claimed they had office space on lease pre-pandemic but moved to co-working spaces afterwards with an almost equal number of organisations (36.92%) saying they had office space on lease pre-pandemic but moved to fully-remote work settings without an operational office. While 21.42% of organisations didn’t see any change in their workspace status quo, 5.05% said they intend to stay a virtual-only organisation for the foreseeable future.   

Challenges other than performance management, in a remote organisation, as noted by the respondents are strategy implementation to motivate, engage, and retain employees (18.45%) and planning for office workspaces, e.g whether or not to lease fully-operational physical offices or to leverage co-working spaces (18.15%).

The survey also speaks about how organisations are planning to build organisational resilience, business sustainability, and workforce health security by devising new strategies and evolving methodologies. 50.29% of respondents agreed to increase their L&D (Learning and Development) budget by 15-25% in 2022 with 25.59% saying their margin will be anywhere between 25-50%. The business resilience isn’t just limited to an increase in L&D budget but also encompasses mental health-related initiatives to increase by 10-20% for 46.42% of the participating companies with 29.76% saying it will be 20-30% for them. 

Onboarding and implementation of new tools is also a top-order priority with organisations with 26.48% planning to employ remote employee performance apps. Remote engagement and remote monitoring systems are other tools as per 18.75% and 17.26% of organisations respectively, which they want to adopt to better streamline their hybrid workforce.  

Commenting on the findings, Ajoy Thomas, VP & Business Head for Retail, E-Commerce, Logistics & Transportation (RELT) Vertical at TeamLease said, ““As the economy is slowly opening up and organisations are looking to welcome their employees back, they want to foolproof their workspaces and environment to accommodate the employee preferences in a way that also aligns with business sustainability and growth. Both can be balanced in the best way possible by redefining what productivity looks like, how it’s measured, and how employees are being engaged and retained in the long term. The survey observes all such nuances and captures future-readiness of companies to adopt hybrid or virtual work settings as the case may be.”

To sort out their current challenges such as planning for a hybrid work environment and infrastructure (38.09%) and planning L&D initiatives in alignment with in-demand skills and increased business risks (32.73%), companies are contemplating devising strategic approaches to mitigate them. Bringing in new skill proximity and learning agility metrics to quickly map the future skill needs (33.43%) and designing talent development programs that are flexible, personalized, modular, and recognize individualistic learning patterns (30.44%) are a few of them.