Tools, management, trust... What are the pillars of a successful employee experience with the new hybrid work modes?
A balance still in the making
According to the latest Insee figures, telecommuting now concerns more than one in five private-sector employees, with the practice now standardized around a hybrid pattern of two remote days a week.
However, this long-term trend has not settled all questions on the subject. Many companies initially thought of hybrid working in terms of authorized days, charters and attendance rules. The return to the office had to be organized, agreements stabilized, and a balance struck between employee autonomy and the need for coordination. But once this framework had been established, another difficulty arose: how to guarantee a coherent work experience when employees no longer permanently share the same premises, the same working hours, nor the same conditions of access to resources?
Beyond the number of days teleworked, we need to understand what employees experience when they move from a shared office to their home, from a videoconference meeting to concentration time, from fluid access to their tools to a blocking incident.
This is the continuity of the employee experience.
The ordinary details of the hybrid experience
In a hybrid model, a working day can be "turned upside down" for seemingly trivial reasons, such as a computer not connecting to the VPN, a meeting where remote employees can't hear the exchanges in the room, or a manager who confuses digital availability with real availability.
These situations are not just a matter of practical organization, but can lead to fatigue, irritation and even a feeling of isolation. Hybrid work calls for a rethinking of several aspects of management, including cooperation between employees, task sharing, exchange formats and informal time.
The subject therefore lies at the intersection of three areas: HR, real estate and IT.
This is what makes HR digital transformation more complex than simply deploying collaborative tools. Communication platforms, shared workspaces and office reservation solutions can make day-to-day life easier, but they are not enough if the rules of use remain unclear, if managers reproduce face-to-face reflexes from a distance, or if IT support does not keep pace with the level of demand created by these new ways of working.
Trust as managerial infrastructure
Hybrid management is based on a paradox. It gives employees greater autonomy, but demands greater clarity from the organization. When everyone is present in the same place, part of the coordination takes place through observation, informal adjustment and immediate availability. At a distance, these mechanisms weaken, and what wasn't made explicit must become so.
Trust does not mean "letting go" without setting a framework. On the contrary, it implies clarifying objectives, priorities, collective moments, expected response times, subjects that require a meeting and those that can be dealt with asynchronously.
The Anact-Apec report on teleworking refers to management by trust, management by results and the reconfiguration of workspaces as areas opened up by hybridization.
As far as HR functions are concerned, this development naturally requires more detailed support for managers. It's not enough to remind them that they need to maintain the link, they need to help them develop their rituals, spot weak signals, avoid digital over-solicitation and maintain time for feedback. SQORUS, a consultancy firm specializing in the transformation of HR, Finance and IT functions, is involved in precisely these structuring projects with ETIs and large corporations. In this type of approach, the challenge is to make managerial practices compatible with a less visible organization.
The office must regain its purpose
The office hasn't disappeared, but its role has changed.
Now that employees can carry out part of their tasks remotely, coming to the office no longer has the same meaning as before. Presence must regain a clear purpose (to cooperate, to integrate a new employee, to arbitrate, to create, to transmit, to deal with sensitive issues, etc.).
Against this backdrop, the flex office has sometimes been seen as a real-estate or even budgetary solution, but when poorly thought out, it is more often a synonym for irritation. Not knowing where to set up, not finding a quiet space, coming into the office to spend the day videoconferencing - these are all situations that damage rather than enhance the employee experience.
Spaces must therefore be linked to uses. In particular, SQORUS has worked on workplace trends, highlighting environments adapted to different needs, from concentration to breathing between two meetings. This approach ties in with a simple idea: in a hybrid model, the office becomes an organizational tool, provided its role is assumed.
IT support, a discreet link in the daily routine
There's another, less talked-about yet decisive dimension: IT support. In a "traditional" environment, an incident can sometimes be resolved by a visit to the office next door, an exchange with support or the intervention of a technician on site. At a distance, the same problem can block an entire morning's work. For the employee, each problem is therefore potentially synonymous with a break in activity.
This is where a remote control tool takes on a more strategic role than it might seem. EasyRemote by Septeo, for example, lets you take control of a remote workstation without first installing an agent, or provide permanent access to recurring workstations, according to support needs, via code or direct connections, and with features genuinely designed for remote assistance.
In a hybrid model, this rapid response capability contributes directly to the employee experience. An isolated employee faced with a problem of access, configuration or software should not feel that the fact of teleworking makes him or her less well supported. IT support thus becomes an element of managerial continuity as much as a technical service.
Consistency above all
As a general rule, a new way of working is weakened when the systems do not work together.
The hybrid employee experience is therefore built as a system, with HR to provide the framework, managers to build trust, IT to guarantee access to tools, and spaces to give a reason to face-to-face meetings. None of these pillars is sufficient on its own. In fact, their interconnection is more important than their individual "sophistication".
And this is undoubtedly where the maturity of organizations lies. Hybrid working is measured in terms of employees' ability to work without unnecessary friction, to cooperate without overload, to be supported even at a distance, and to rediscover the collective when face-to-face work brings real value. Above all, the challenge is to ensure that the alternation between office and telecommuting does not become a succession of disruptions.
