Many businesses are calling for employees to return to the office at least part-time in 2023, but it’s unlikely corporate offices will look like they did before 2020. After years of working from home and increased flexibility, employees know how they work best and will push back on arbitrary reasons to come into the office. That said, according to a poll by Gallup, there are still challenges to hybrid work, including feeling less connected to the organization’s culture and seeing impaired collaboration and relationships.

This is why the top corporate trend in the new year is engagement. In hybrid or fully remote environments, managers must intuit what their employees need to feel connected to their coworkers and the company itself. Much of this can be spearheaded through continued education within the company, but it must be conducted with the right tactics and tools.

The knee-jerk technology integrations of the early pandemic won’t cut it anymore. To truly engage employees in a hybrid environment, companies must identify the right technology for the job, measure its success and make it feel like a digital home base.

The right tech.

By now, companies should know what they need for their employees to do their best work remotely – or at least the employees should know what they need, and managers need to learn what those resources are. It’s time to invest in permanent solutions, and communication is key. Even if some departments are still siloed, it’s important to talk with the whole organization and find out what’s working for those departments and the employees at various levels.

Are employees still using the technology as it was installed in 2020, or have they augmented it? Have they done away with it entirely for a different solution? What are the most important features for the finance department as compared to those needed by sales or human resources? It may come to light that one tool alone isn’t the best fit for everyone in every department.

That’s not to say a company needs to buy multiple solutions from multiple vendors. Too many disparate systems will negatively affect collaboration and engagement. However, it does mean one all-or-nothing approach may not be the most effective. The key is overall integration. Leaders need to examine how platforms can be used to ensure they work well with the company and other systems or applications.

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Measured success.

After employees share what is and isn’t working for them, what’s driving the most successes, or what’s inhibiting training or onboarding, managers should have this follow-up question ready to go: “How do you know?”

In most cases, the answer to that question relies on the honor system. If a new employee passes an onboarding evaluation, managers could assume the tech or program they used was effective. That’s not always true, so the best way to measure effectiveness is through analytics. Measure variations between onboarding instructors, sales results, overall use and more to build a solid data set to inform what works best.

Home base.

When you log into your company’s LMS, intranet or website, does it create the same feeling as walking into your office building? To some extent, it should. Ideally, when you enter your office, you will notice it looks like your company and exudes its values, you feel like you belong there and that it’s a place to get work done (even if you can’t wear sweatpants).

In today’s hybrid world, an employee should be able to log online to work from anywhere at any time and know immediately that they are part of the organization. Having the right technology is part of it, but branding that tech is another. Branding isn’t just a logo at the top of a webpage. It’s your digital office. It should function as a launch pad, hub or home base for everything you can do within the company’s system. Employees should be able to see how they fit and grow within the company, how they collaborate with team members and much more as soon as they log in.

Engagement will be essential in 2023, but it’s not something that can be forced from the top down. It’s built from the right systems with the right tools, it measures successes and room for improvement, and it brings employees across the company together as a community. Cohesion and collaboration are built from engagement and vice versa. It’s important to have the right tools in place so employees aren’t derailed by frustrating systems before they have a chance to talk to a coworker.

This may not be a fast process. Even getting your arms around all the technology solutions your company already uses, not to mention those that you could use, will take time. Beginning those conversations, though, will open the door for more engagement and set your company on the right path for the ideal hybrid work environment.

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