The workplace is evolving, and organizations are embracing hybrid work models that combine remote and in-office work. While returning to the office (RTO) offers potential benefits, it's crucial to have a strategic plan in place to ensure a smooth transition and maximize success. This guide equips you with the tools and insights you need to navigate the hybrid work landscape effectively.
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Risks involved in return to office
Digital work is still invisible
Regardless of where work happens (office or remote), digital work is dominant. Even when employees are in the office, leaders cannot verify productivity via outdated manager walk-arounds. Without clear visibility into digital work, in-office work is just as difficult, if not impossible, to measure and optimize as remote work.
Unclear office space ROI
The era of hot-desking and flexible work arrangements is here to stay. Business leaders must be able to correlate office space costs with improvements in workforce productivity and better business outcomes to justify them.
Remove return-to-office barriers with ActivTrak
ActivTrak removes barriers to return-to-office policies by providing organizations with instant visibility into people, processes and technology. Follow the steps below to use ActivTrak to help you plan a successful return-to-office strategy.
Understand productivity patterns with Location Insights
As a first step, we recommend that leaders review productivity patterns by location before implementing a return-to-office policy.
Productivity by Location offers location-based data on employee productivity and work habits, enabling leaders to make informed decisions about workplace policies and optimize team performance.
Set and track goals to measure performance improvements
Once productivity by location has been baselined, we recommend leaders set goals to track and measure success with a return-to-office policy.
Benchmarks & Goals help leaders understand baselines and trends, set team-level goals and track progress toward desired productivity improvements.
Confirm compliance with the return-to-office policy
Once your return-to-office policy is in place, you'll need to ensure employee compliance.
Productivity by Location provides clear, week-by-week breakdowns of both teams and users by location, so you can verify whether employees and teams are coming into the office as expected and as outlined in your policy.
Create automated exception reports to be notified via email about any return-to-office policy violations.
Example: If you have a hybrid policy that requires employees to work from the office three days a week, you can confirm if that is happening by viewing location data for the week. In this case, "Office" should appear at least three days for each work week, and if you have set up automated exception reports, you will be notified when any employees do not meet that threshold.
Measure productivity and collaboration
Once you've confirmed compliance with your return-to-office policy, please check in on how the work location is affecting productivity, collaboration and overall company culture.
Focus & Collaboration and Productivity Achievement dashboards help you assess your team's work habits by location.
Offline Meetings should be recorded to gain full visibility into employee workdays, including time spent in meetings, even when they're not online.
Conduct a before-and-after analysis
How can you assess the impact of your return-to-office policy on your organization?
Impact Analysis allows you to easily conduct a before-and-after analysis to determine the impact of your new location-based policy on organizational productivity, efficiency and more.
Like the results? Great! Are the results falling short of expectations? Consider making additional changes based on your unbiased data insights in ActivTrak.
Learn more
- Check out ActivTrak’s Productivity Lab for workforce productivity research, best practices and trends.
- Visit the ActivTrak Academy for training on how to use ActivTrak to achieve your goals. Note: Not available with free plans.
- Need additional assistance? Check out our Support plans to ensure success.