How To Make Hybrid Work Setup Work Your Advantage

How To Make Hybrid Work Setup Work Your Advantage

Hey, guys! Welcome back to the channel. It’s me again, your host, Sean Si. And today we are going to be talking about hybrid work setup. How can you make the most out of a hybrid work setup?

This is for you if you are a business owner, if you’re a team leader or manager, you have a say on what kind of work setup you’d want to have. Right now at SEO Hacker, we are observing hybrid work set up.

So we come to the office and meet each other Tuesdays to Thursdays, but Monday and Friday we work from home. Now it does take special kind of people to make sure that when they’re working from home, they’re really working and producing the best work they possibly can in the most efficient amount of time.

I believe not everyone is cut out to do that, and not everyone has the discipline and the sense of accountability to be able to pull that off. Well, there’s a saying that if you want to enjoy the game, you must observe the rules.

For example, a game of basketball wouldn’t be a fun game if the players would go out of bounds and that’s okay, would hit each other with the basketball in the face and that’s okay. There’s a referee for a reason and that’s to make sure the game is enjoyable and playable.

Rules make the game very, very good. And if you don’t have rules for work from home, the game will not be as enjoyable. So you have to have a work from home setup with a good amount of rules, not just about output.

And I understand there are some companies who are just focused on output, whereas if the output is delivered, you must be working from home very well, they’re happy, and you’re let off the hook.

At SEO Hacker, we observe work from home as if you’re working in the office. That is because one of our core values is respect for work. You have to respect the work that you do. Your time in and time out has to be at par with everyone else. And you have to make sure that you keep yourself in check and you’re accountable to your team leaders on what you do at home as much as you would be as if you were in the office.

Now, there are a couple of things that I want to address here, and I hope you learn from them on how to make the most of a hybrid work setup.

First of which is on those days that you will all be going to the office, you have to make sure that you maximize those face to face interactions. What do I mean? Make sure you maximize your meetings on days that you go on site. That’s when you have all of your meetings. Don’t do your meetings when you’re working from home via Zoom.

For SEO Hacker, we’re in the office Tuesdays to Thursdays, and those are the days that we set our most important meetings. If you have so many meetings, sometimes those meetings would overlap because now you’re just observing three or four working days instead of five or six working days per week.

But you have to be able to manage that and squeeze your meetings only on the days that you’re working onsite, because this maximizes your coordination. This maximizes the enjoyability of those relationships, therefore improving morale. This maximizes ideas. This maximizes appreciation for each other.

We just celebrate all the wins. We applaud people who have done exceedingly well week per week. And we do that live because it doesn’t have as much impact if you’re doing it online via Zoom, via Google Meets, or via any video conferencing platform. The impact is just not there.

In fact, you would probably agree when I say that when you do meetings online, there are some people who are tuned out. Maybe their cameras are turned off or maybe they’re turned on, but they’re doing something else. You could see their eyes moving to and fro and they’re not really tuned in to the conversation or to the meeting, and you lose their engagement.

It’s easy to lose engagement when you’re doing meetings online. So maximize your face to face days on site by making sure your meetings, the most important meetings are there.

You can still do meetings online, such as one-on-one meetings. That is still effective. I’m not saying don’t do meetings then. I’m just saying, as much as you can, do your meetings during your on site face to face days.

Next is, you as the leader have to be able to read the times. And right now, what you need to do is you have to identify how many onsite days are necessary for your team to be able to perform optimally.

There are a lot of people right now clamoring for work from home or hybrid work setups. It would be very hard for you to hire people who are willing to work on a full day work week onsite.

It’s quite hard because a lot of people who are competent or who are very skilled would want at least a hybrid work setup. So it makes a lot of sense for you as the business owner or as the leader to have a hybrid work setup, at least for now.

If you do decide that there are X number of days that we are going to be working onsite, X number of days we’re going to be working from home, you now have to make sure that your face to face onsite days don’t suck.

You have to make sure that these days are going to be desirable. They’re exciting for your people to go to the office and see each other. You have to have meetings that also don’t suck.

Your meetings have to be enjoyable. They have to be meaningful. They have to be snappy. They have to be fast paced. They have to be engaging. It is your job. It is incumbent upon you to do that.

Because if people dread going to the office, they’re really not going to go to the office. And sooner or later you might find that people would resign because you’re making them go to the office and work in such a boring and dreadful way.

Next is if you would have work from home days and with the hybrid work setup, you must have work from home days, you have to make sure to guard those work from home days with high accountability.

You see, not everyone can work from home in such a disciplined and accountable manner. Some people would work from home and they would be less efficient. They would be a lot less disciplined. They would not be accountable and you’re paying them for nothing. So you have to make sure that you have systems in place to guard and protect those work from home days.

At SEO hacker we use Hubstaff that is owned by Dave Nevogt. He’s a good friend from the US and this allows us to monitor where people are going as they are working, which URLs, what applications, what websites are they visiting, how long are they staying there, what are they doing there.

 It takes three screenshots in 10 minutes. It’s not so invasive. If you would count, 10 minutes is 600 seconds. You’re just taking three screenshots out of those seconds. So if you’re given screenshots that are dubious, there’s a high chance that they’ve been staying in that web page or application far too long and you’d be able to decide now with your intuition as the leader on what’s really happening.

This allows us to have really good, productive work from home days with everyone in our team. Another way to make the most out of your hybrid work setup is to be strategic on when your work from home dates will be.

There’s a reason why our work from home days are Mondays and Fridays, so that it makes it seem like we have long weekends because people would be staying at home Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

So what happens is people are pumped to go back to the office and spend Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday working with each other, collaborating together and having fun with each other in our meetings in the office.

This also allows us to maximize rest because when you’re at home, you’re a lot less stressed, you are a lot more rested and you have more peace. Yes, collaboration is lower and slower, but people who have a high level of discipline, responsibility and accountability are actually oftentimes more productive when they’re working from home.

With that said, when you’re adjusting to make the most of your hybrid work setup, you also need to screen and hire more carefully. You have to make sure that the people you hire are able to work from home with a high amount of discipline, responsibility, and accountability.

And yes, you can gauge this in the hiring process. Just ask the right questions such as: What do you do in your spare time? What do you do when no one is looking? You can create a scenario or you can ask them: What would your friends say about you that you need to improve about yourself?

These kinds of questions help you to identify, is this the right person I want on my team, especially when we’re running a hybrid work setup and they’re going to be given an opportunity to work from home and have less accountability because there’s no one there at their house but themselves and their families.

And it will help you have more peace of mind and sleep well at night when you hire the right people who can work from home very well. Stemming from that, you should also identify people who cannot work from home well, and you may need to part ways with them. You may need to let them go.

Because if they can’t work well from home, other team members would know and get wind of it. And you have to honor people who work well from home by letting go of people who can’t honor their jobs, who can’t respect their work because they can’t work from home well.

They lose their discipline. They’re not accountable. They’re not as responsible. They miss deadlines. These are things that would waste a lot of time for you as the leader and business owner because you need to keep checking on these people.

 Remember, you hire people to help grow your business, not to take more time from you as the business owner so that you need to keep checking on them.

So that’s it. I hope that this episode has added value to you today. If you’re considering doing a hybrid work setup or if you already are running a hybrid work setup, I hope you got some pointers out of this.

And if you have, please do help share it with a friend, colleague, family member who is also thinking of running a hybrid work setup or maybe they’re running it as well.

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Again, this is Sean, your host, and I will see you in the next episode.