How to Set up a Hybrid Office Environment for Your Team

It’s no surprise that COVID-19 changed the way we work. While many organizations are returning to office environments, they are also trying to ensure their team can still work effectively from home. For the transition between a remote workstation and the office to be effective, it needs to be efficient. At Regroove, our employees have the hardware they need so they can commute between the office and home without issue.

In this blog, we’ll outline our current hardware recommendations for setting up an effective hybrid office environment for your team.

What Is a Hybrid Office Environment?

When organizations transitioned to working from home at the start of COVID-19, many believed this to be a temporary solution on the way back to the status quo. Over a year later, one thing has become clear: for many organizations, working from home is here to stay. While some companies may have established work-from-home as the new normal, others are working on creating a hybrid environment that allows employees the freedom to work from home or come in to the office. 

What Should You Consider When Creating a Hybrid Environment?

When considering setting up a hybrid office environment, there are some key things to keep in mind.

• Accessibility. Ensuring it is easy for your team to move between their home workstation and the office is key to promoting a hybrid work environment. That includes gear that is easy to transport between the office and home while maintaining similar set ups in each location so that your team doesn’t need to adapt their working habits to each change in environment.
• Security. Ensuring your devices are secure when commuting between home and the office is paramount to your organization’s overall security. Check out our blog post for security tips in Microsoft 365 to see how you can ensure your employee devices are secure, no matter where they work from.
• Cloud-first. Transitioning between home and the office can be difficult, but it will be next to impossible for organizations that don’t adopt a cloud-first position. A cloud-first workspace ensures files can be accessed from anywhere and helps place communication and collaboration at the forefront of your business processes.
  
  Looking for help becoming a cloud-first organization? Check out our cloud services that help you get into the cloud and do more once you’re there!

What Hardware Is Required to Set up a Hybrid Office?

At Regroove, we focus on providing hardware that makes it easy for our team to transition from home to the office and back. While working from home, our team can maintain the same level of professionalism and productivity, and it helps team members feel a sense of ease when coming back to the office. To accomplish this, we’ve provided our team with the following hardware:

• Microsoft Surface. Each of our team members is given a Microsoft Surface Laptop. These touchscreen laptops provide excellent video and audio quality and combine powerful processing with a sleek design that makes it easy to transport between home and the office.
• Microsoft Surface Dock. The best part about the Microsoft Surface? It integrates with the Microsoft Surface Dock. We provide each employee with a dock to take home, and the same dock sits on every desk in our office to ensure an easy transition between the two. Monitors, keyboards, headphones, and other accessories all plug into the dock to ensure that at home and in the office, employees can sit down, plug in, and start working.
• Jabra Headset. Good audio quality is essential for a hybrid working environment. Virtual meetings are here to stay, and good audio is essential to ensure productive and high-quality meetings. Our team uses the Jabra Evolve 75 Headset, which connects easily to Bluetooth and integrates well with Microsoft Teams.
• Wireless keyboard and mouse. While choice is key here, a wireless keyboard and mouse helps to ensure consistency between the home and work environments. You can either provide a keyboard and mouse for your team to take home, and provide the same ones at work for consistency, or provide one set that employees can bring with them when they come back into the office. At Regroove, we’ve provided each team member with a wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse for their home office, and provide the same devices at work.

BONUS: Hot-Desking

While you’re implementing a hybrid work environment for your team, you may consider setting up ‘hot-desking’ in your office. Hot-desking is the idea that any employee can sit down at any desk in your workspace, plug in, and get to work. It removes the concept of personalized workspaces or desks that belong to a single individual and encourages flexibility and ease of use. It helps maximize use of your office space and reduce unused desks – especially when you’ve implemented a hybrid working environment and all of your staff are not in the office at the same time or on a particular working schedule.

At Regroove, we’ve implemented hot-desking so that our team members can book any desk in the office. Each desk is accompanied with two monitors, a dock, a keyboard, and a mouse. Hot-desking also allows us to offer space to our clients and other businesses looking for a place to work. We have two meeting spaces that can be booked while you’re in the office, that connect to Microsoft Teams through a hub that allows staff working from home to join meetings with ease. We have been using Microsoft Bookings to allow team members to book specific spaces in our office and track office occupancy in order to comply with COVID-19 regulation. However, it is better suited to very basic purposes and doesn’t offer much customizability in terms of form content or design, so we’ll be implementing Cloudspark Reserve as an alternative.

Conclusion

The working world has changed. Working from home is here to stay, and many organizations are determining their stance on hybrid work environments as we move towards a post-pandemic “new normal”. Ensuring your team has the right hardware to move between home and the office is integral to implementing a successful hybrid work environment. That’s why we recommend consistency between home and office workspaces, providing devices that are easily transported between locations, and stepping up security to protect your devices and data wherever your team is working from. What’s most important to a hybrid work environment? Creating a cloud-first organization to simplify file sharing, communication, and collaboration.

Looking for assistance in setting up your hybrid work environment? Get in touch!