Top tips to transitioning to a hybrid working model

In many parts of the world, businesses are defining their new normal, including those in the manufacturing sectors. Combinations of remote working with ‘collaboration days’ in the office are emerging as a favourite, offering your teams greater flexibility if your teams have already proven that they are able to carry out their roles entirely remotely.  

Cultural belonging, whether your teams are performing their roles in critical operations or those required to satisfy daily management, is being highlighted as equally as important with businesses responsible for ensuring team cohesion. Read on, as we discuss some useful points to help employers achieve these objectives, including the themes of inclusivity, balance and connection. 
 

 
Capturing employee insights 

 Businesses focused on initiatives to become more inclusive, or diverse, are focused on building communication channels and systems that allow employee views to be captured, reviewed and actioned. Representation from across the employee network should be considered to ensure everyone has a chance to voice their perspectives.  
 
Employee networking can be a tricky business when you are trying to cater for a mix of introverted and extroverted personality types. Encouraging and offering the options for both in-person, activity based and online social calls between colleagues is key to giving every person the opportunity to get involved.  Allowing or creating mechanisms to capture insights outside of meetings where those willing to speak up may dominate, written channels may prosper where questions and comments can be gained outside of any employee events. 
 
 

Offering guidance and clarity on new working structures 

Many of us are used to working from home now, are we ready for a shakeup? Businesses can put together clear information, delivered both verbally and in writing that presents your teams with how hybrid working should be used to maximise understanding. Are employees expected to hot desk? Or should they expect to return to their dedicated work areas? Is there going to continue to be regular business updates? Regardless of being home working or in the office, regular breaks away from screen time or to stretch your legs should continue to be advocated to ensure those healthy routines across diets and exercising schedules do not suffer. 
 
 

Staying connected 

 To remain effective regardless of where your teams have been operating from, connectivity is key. Without physically working alongside teams, managers have been finding ways to stay in touch with employees. Extra efforts to guide and support them is becoming more important to ensuring they are working happily, productively and will not be swayed by external offers. From wellbeing to making sure they have access to all of the resources they require; managers must consider the needs of their teams working in hybrid models. 
 
 For manufacturing operations, keen to manage their businesses from inventory, production and shipping, right through to HR files, logging leave, learning and development and more, ERP software solutions could be your ticket to both team cohesion, transparency and seamless processing. 

Removing the need for lots of department specific systems, a WinMan system can help you connect your finance with your productivity, helping to keep your teams connected. With up-to-the-minute information available to your operators from any location at any time, remote teams can benefit from digital proximity to the inner workings of operations. And manufacturing technicians can feed in live data through a range of mobile WinMan Go apps, designed to simplify and speed up data entry away from your traditional shopfloor desktop stations. Across the manufacturing and production industries, ERP enables you to keep your fingers on the pulse, tracking business data at any hour of the day.  

If you’re ready to make your move to exploring a tailored ERP that will wrap about your business operations, enabling you to build resilience whilst also empowering your super teams – click the button below to contact us today.  

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