17 Oct
There has been a lot written about the Hybrid World of Work and recently I ran a survey asking leaders about what was working well and some of the issues or concerns they had.
I thought I would share some initial results with you. If you are a leader or manager I would love you to participate and you can link to the survey here The New Way of Working in Real Estate »
Here is what the survey is telling us so far:
78% of offices have moved towards having work from home options and of this 53% had a mix of some days in the office and others from home. A hybrid model that seems to be working better than others.
23% had an adhoc structure which we know from other trials can cause issues long term.
Interestingly 15% had asked all employees to return to the office.
So far only 38% of respondents feel the hybrid model is working well and their people thriving and almost equal number feel their structure needs more tweaking to get it right.
Leaders are often challenged by their employees on “why do they need to be in the office if they can do the same work from home”. If we want people to come back into the office a few days a week it needs to be more than just doing the same work. Can we link in training, team or culture days which has a positive impact on connection.
57% of our respondents said that the work is no different and maybe this links into 30% having issue keeping people connected to the culture.
The hybrid model is built on high levels of trust, some of the issues that managers and leaders are experiencing connects directly with this.
Some of the concerns are not having a clear line of productivity, concerns about effectiveness and not confident that the work is being done and service levels are being delivered to.
Technology enables the success of hybrid models and saw the industry move to contactless and virtual options during COVID. Two years later 20% have maintained virtual inspections, 25% provide virtual tours online and only 15% offer contactless move ins. Perhaps a consideration for the industry and teams is to understand what opportunities technology offers us and how do we adopt our business processes to take advantage of this.
Lastly, we asked about what some of the key concerns or challenges are and 50% of our respondents say that profitability is a clear challenge, as is recruitment, office structure, they hybrid culture and on going accountability of teams.
We have no previous hybrid model to refer to in this changing world of work, we are writing the rules as we go.
It would be great to have you complete the survey and we will continue to share the results with you. Collectively as an industry, if we can collaborate and work together on many of the issues we are all currently facing we are more likely to discover better solutions then trying to do it on our own.
