Hybrid working is being adopted globally as a strategy to combat COVID infections in the workplace or ease workers back into the office environment after months or sometimes more than a year of working remotely.
The benefits of this strategy are numerous, removing the daily commute for the employee several days a week, and will also help the business owner to keep their overheads down, or even enabling them to find smaller premises for the same or larger headcount. However, the fact remains that without that dynamic face-to-face environment that the office generates, the creative elements that are essential to effective social media posting could possibly suffer.
Social media traffic is the life-blood of your business
If, like many businesses, social media not only generates the most traffic to your site but also the most relevant traffic, this can be a huge problem. By using social media effectively, you can find potential customers who are already aligned with your company ethos and have a built-in desire for your products. Without this supply, your business won’t stay around very long, so when it comes to addressing the hybrid working issue, you shouldn’t need telling twice that there can be no half measures.
Creating a virtual office environment
The easiest way to do this (on paper at least) is to duplicate the office environment virtually, but as many companies have already found out to their cost, this is much easier said than done. The balance between ‘in touch’ and invasive when it comes to your staff working remotely can be a delicate one, and effective communication can often suffer as a result. Picking the right suite of software can be part of an effective solution but could open up another range of issues.
Taking the mystery out of cloud-based working
The most obvious and most effective solution, if you have projects that need to be worked on by multiple people who could be either in the office or at home, is to have a cloud-based solution. The first hurdle here is that many people within your business will have very little idea how it all works or what the cloud actually is.
It is this area that has seen the most casualties, and by finding professional help when it comes to using Microsoft 365 services, you can neatly sidestep this pitfall that has claimed so many others. This is because if you don’t know what you are doing when you have that much data moving between a number of sources, there can be some serious problems.
Keeping on top of your social media commitments
You can’t maintain effective communication with your audience if you can’t do it within your own company, and with information flowing freely and securely the same way it would in the office, social media posting should be as easy as it was before. This means that there will be very little chance of your Instagram account posting about a product that is not quite ready due to poor communication or anything else that could damage your online presence.