Working from home: hybrid working

Charities around the UK are looking forward to welcoming staff back into their offices as COVID-19 restrictions are slowly lifted. But after the enforced changes in working practices over the last fourteen months, things are unlikely to return to the way they were before the pandemic for a long time, if ever.

That’s because many charities have discovered the advantages of staff working from home – the ability to benefit from the skills of people who live too far away to work in the office or who may have mobility issues, lower office overheads, better work life balance, and less commuting stress, to name just a few.

As a result, many charities are looking to transition from staff working from home to hybrid working. This involves some office-based staff, some home workers, and some hybrid workers: staff members who work some of the time at home and some of the time in the charity office.

For staff transitioning to hybrid working, there are a number of important things to consider.

Office reconfiguration 

With a significant number of hybrid workers, most charities will need less dedicated desk space. But that begs the question of where hybrid staff will work when they do come in to the office.

Likely solutions include “hot desking”, where all staff can sit down at any free desk rather than having their own workspace, and more informal open plan workspaces where hybrid staff can place a laptop and start working.

Since charities are likely to have fewer staff working in the office at any given time than previously, this provides an opportunity to reconfigure the office to include more meeting rooms or collaboration spaces.

Alternatively, it may be possible to repurpose office space, either by using it for some other charity activity, such as service delivery, or by subletting it to other businesses or charities, or putting up event or meeting space for hire.

Hybrid working technology 

One of the biggest inconveniences of hybrid working is finding that the documents, spreadsheets, and other resources that they need when they are working from home on a laptop are on their office computer, or vice versa.

Overcoming this may require changes to working practices, for example by storing all computer files in the cloud where they are accessible from anywhere. 

The use of a password manager such as LastPass or Keeper which can store and sync bookmarks and passwords between browsers can also help ensure hybrid workers have easy access to all their passwords and important websites regardless of whether they happen to be in the office or at home.