7 Apps To Face Hybrid Work Challenges

With hybrid work offering to combine benefits of WFH and onsite models (most importantly, the flexibility of working hours and maintaining social connections), the idea lands well among lots of companies.

According to McKenzie estimations, workers can be expected to attend offices from one to four days per week, which will require the implementation of different management policies.

The recent news confirms the strengthening of hybrid work trend that the European accounting firms, in particular, are starting to put into practice actively.

Indeed, with implementing automatic time tracking software for free, employee time keeping and project management tracking challenges get an easy solution.

However, there are other related areas that require special attention before we proclaim the end of 'cubicle reign'.

To decide if your company has capabilities for enabling remote work with effectiveness, we recommend checking great reads here and here.

Hurdles Hybrid Workers Commonly Face

According to Stanford studies, most remote workers name social isolation as one major downside of all-remote mode, which makes hybrid (when workers are allowed to alternate office and WFH) an ideally balanced work option.

However, without deep changes, businesses could experience a fail in choosing the right tone when saying hello to hybrid work. For a start, hybrid work requires that the processes stay aligned, and teams communications improve.

Therefore, the central question in facing the possible hybrid work challenges is: "How to create a system that will provide the benefit of higher flexibility for employees without causing organizational chaos?"

For winning hybrid work, it is important that employers keep in focus:

• Providing conditions for autonomous work so that employees are tech ready to adapt accordingly regardless of where their workstation is located
• Documentation of communication that includes adequate feedback and leaves no room for assumptions.

Hybrid Work Essentials

In post pandemic work environment, organizing hybrid work on the level of seamless experience can be a mandatory expectation.

To throw away many of the accepted rules and outdated protocols that do not serve well under the changed work conditions, businesses need to provide clear guidelines determined by hybrid work requirements linked in an increased attention to:

• safety
• employees' mental wellbeing
• empathetic leadership
• diversity.

Ignoring the value-based changes at time of the reopening may come at a risk of falling behind competitors. According to Conversation:

Firms may prefer traditional work practices, but progress in society will require that a new normal is established.

In the long term perspective, the corporate culture attuned to these requirements will pay off by building a more resilient and future proof work environment.

Below, we name tools that prove to be reliable assistants in facing possible challenges of hybrid work related to administration and communication processes.

TMetric: Ideal Time Keeping App for Hybrid Teams

In hybrid mode, the pressure of trying to keep the tasks and working hours updated can get overwhelming, and the time tracker with the basic ability to start and stop an activity would not be enough.

TMetric offers advanced functionality that includes:

• generation of detailed reports on demand
• task management options
• PTO module for tracking employees' attendance and time off regardless of their onsite, remote, or hybrid presence
• working offline (to empower the digital switch-off routine)
• setting project rates and budgets
• calculating time in related services (by integration in the mail and virtual communication tools to give insights into work processes).

The Bottom Line: When setting a hybrid-remote environment, opting for TMetric time tracking for hybrid teams translates into keeping workflows productive and smooth by automating work time calculations for employees using hybrid workstations.

Livestorm: Easy Video Conferencing App

Livestorm is a comprehensive service that enables teams to have video communication of high quality and provides detailed event analytics.

It is available across any device and gives access to service in real-time:

• Hybrid teams engaged in marketing, customer support, sales, and HR use this platform for improved communication.
• Irreplaceable in promoting a new team collaborative hybrid-based culture.
• Aside from featuring lots of options, this video conferencing solution is affordable, well-integrated, and easy to apply.

The Bottom Line: Livestorm allows not only holding multiple online events that create a seamless experience for hybrid teams but also delivers live interactions and event recording for further reviewing.

Workast: Task Management for Slack teams

Workast is a task management app for teams that use Slack. Workast connects directly to a Slack workspace so team members can create and manage tasks, inside their conversations.

Workast helps teams working in hybrid to:

• Get more work done in less time with Workast's Slack integration.
• See everything that the team needs to do with reporting.
• Never forget another task with reminders and Slack notifications.
• Streamline processes with custom forms.

The Bottom Line: Workast is a completely customizable task management solution for teams in hybrid work settings, increasing employee productivity and efficiency with greater transparency within the organization.

Teams: Messaging App for Hybrid Teams

The use cases of this app go beyond traditional work environments and find wide applications across lots of industries including business, healthcare, and education. Aside from providing high-level security and compliance with standards of privacy, there are lots of hybrid work-friendly features:

• It has chat and message options to promote collaboration
• It enables teams to hold committee meetings
• Diverse contact management
• Initiating of discussions
• It integrates with digital ecosystems smoothly
• Provides recording of the meetings
• Additionally, it has functionality for video conferencing.

The Bottom Line: Teams greatly facilitate communication, remove the necessity to be bogged in long email threads, and liberate employees in hybrid work settings by providing conditions for proactive participation.

M-Files: Document Distribution Tool

It is a smart solution for complex document management that guarantees to improve hybrid team performance significantly. Besides the improvement of workflow, it contributes to the increase of information distribution by featuring:

• content management functions
• multiple templates
• provision of digital asset management
• document classification and generation
• smart archiving
• tracking of information compliance.

The Bottom Line: M-Files proven its high level of performance in more than 100 countries as it works best for hybrid teams in SMB and delivers reliability and high value in terms of management of business information.

CloudApp: Visual Communication Tool

CloudApp provides visual communication widely used in customer support, product development, sales, marketing, and design. It suits a hybrid workplace ideally by creating collaborative space and delivering options for:

• sharing videos, GIFs, screenshots
• annotations on images
• screen and webcam recording
• filters for facilitating search
• document generation inside the app.

The Bottom Line: It makes the best use of asynchronous communication and enhances the user experience in a hybrid environment by personalizing it. This way, meetings can accommodate multiple participants but enable the host to take charge of the process.

Calendar: Effortless Scheduling

To balance the cognitive workload amplified by too many virtual calls, we need to pay special attention to arranging a consistent schedule adjusted to hybrid work.

Indeed, one of the most important collaborative tools is a scheduler that would cater to specific hybrid environment needs. The functionality, which is well-attuned to hybrid-remote settings, makes Calendar your ideal collaboration solution. It features:

• Address Book and sync of the contacts
• Unobtrusive system of reminders
• Functionality for event management
• Data sharing for viewing relevant scheduling options

The Bottom Line: This tool prevents overlaps in scheduling while additionally, providing detailed analysis of the time allocation on meetings and associated tasks.

Pragli: Virtual Assistant for Hybrid Teams

Unlike other communication tools, Pragli provides one important option, the permanent availability of the collaboration channel. It features rooms that are always open so that team members can enter or leave as their schedule requires. It features:

• avatar builder to enable a gamified user experience
• choose whether your room is currently open or closed
• video and screen share
• choice of audio/video format recording.

The Bottom Line: It creates a more efficient environment for hybrid-remote teams by providing the mechanism for copying behavior in the actual office that supposes organizing the meetings instantly.

Fyle: For a Seamless Expense Management Process

The easiest way to automate your entire pre-accounting process end-to-end. Fyle enables your Finance teams to gain complete control over your expense management process by giving them full visibility into company-wide business expenses from one unified dashboard. It's perfect for a hybrid work model as it enables:

• Easy submission and tracking of business expenses
• Automated compliance through pre-submission checks
• Complete visibility into company-wide spending patterns and trends
• Seamless integrations with prominent accounting software

The Botton Line: In a hybrid setting, the software ensures that your employees have the freedom to submit their business expenses with ease while also reducing the manual labor on your Finance teams to verify each of these expenses manually. By ensuring all your expense reports are policy-compliant, Fyle keeps expense fraud at bay while also letting you stay audit-ready.

Conclusion

With digital tools performing like a crucial enabler for company transition to a hybrid work environment, every manager needs to opt for the apps that would ideally fit in the specific business policies.

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The tools listed above suit small and medium businesses that concentrate on creating a smooth workflow and facilitate the work processes adjusted to hybrid work settings.