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Which work structure is sustainable in the long term depends to a large extent on the job.
During the pandemic home office and hybrid working evolved from a rare luxury to an everyday practice on the job market.
After 2 years, there are already relevant experiences and surveys that make it worthwhile to review the working structures used so far. Have full-remote (home office), full office presence (onsite) or a hybrid solution combining the two worked best?
"Over the past 2 years, several surveys have been conducted, both in Hungary and worldwide, on the experiences, advantages, disadvantages and employee and employer satisfaction with work structures.
These show that digitalization has been relatively easy to achieve in office-based jobs, with more than 90% of employees no longer going back to the office onsite.
This is also due to the fact that the pandemic has accelerated the digitalization of processes related to office positions. This is particularly true for the tech sector, but also for some jobs in almost all segments (e.g. finance, legal).
For these jobs, it is possible to move a workflow to remote with relatively low resource inputs.
However, this is no longer true for industrial positions, for example, where physical presence is usually indispensable, but robotization and various smart solutions can make work safer and more efficient."
says Aliz Apró, Head of HR at INSPYRE.
Office jobs have long been equipped with hardware and software tools that can be used to perform tasks remotely, even from the other side of the world, as long as there is the right internet access.
In the industrial sector, however, the pandemic has shown that it is essential to catch up in terms of digital maturity from a risk management perspective, as this is the only way to effectively manage a similar crisis and avoid disruption in the global supply chain.
Complex solutions are now available, but the optimization and digitalization of an industry's processes require a much greater investment of resources than in other areas.
As can be seen above, which work structure is sustainable in the long term depends to a large extent on the job.
However, the structure in which one can get the most out of one's work depends on personality and life situation.
The advantages and disadvantages of onsite working have been known for a long time, but the experience of the home office is only just beginning to be put into practice. In the case of full remote working, where the employer does not rent an office, so colleagues only have personal contact with each other when they have a friendly meeting, work can be more focused and there is no commuting, leaving more time for personal life, but also making it harder to separate working time from it. There may be distractions (housework, arrival of a mechanic, children), disruptions to internet service, and it is more difficult to manage confidential information as others may overhear meetings.
Employers also face cybersecurity issues and isolation, that can diminish team cohesion, which can be a deterrent for a colleague considering a change. On the employee side, it is important to remember that without a personal presence, work done may not be visible and may be overshadowed in a promotion, so extra effort needs to be made to make work visible.
Based on experience so far, the hybrid structure seems to be a good solution, as it eliminates isolation problems and allows for stronger teamwork, but it also requires a change in the role of the office space, making it a real community space.
"I think that working structures are still in a state of flux. Technological development hasn't stopped and there are still unknown areas, just think of the still-forming meta-world.
However, it is important that employers only deviate from the working arrangements originally agreed upon with the employee in the course of the process if this does not impose an additional burden on them.
In other words, if a full-remote working arrangement has been agreed upon, it should only be converted into a hybrid or personal presence if this does not require the employee to move to the other side of the world, for example.
And for new or junior employees, it makes sense to use onsite or hybrid working to increase efficiency during the knowledge-sharing and learning period."
says Aliz Apró.