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Covid has vastly accelerated a number of workplace trends already in play, forcing companies to adopt new strategies, policies and technologies at breakneck speed. From digital transformation to remote working, 2020 feels like the year when everything changed in the blink of an eye.

So how should organisations react to this constant cycle of change? At times like this, a certain amount of trepidation is natural. Business doesn’t like uncertainty, because it leads to indecision. How can you plan for a post-pandemic future when it’s impossible to predict what will happen next week?

When lockdown hit in March, thousands of us rushed away from workplaces and set up office in back bedrooms and garden sheds. It wasn’t ideal, but it was good enough. We made the best of it, despite cramped spaces, intrusive children and stuttering Zoom meetings.

And with the arrival of Covid’s second wave this Autumn, that’s the position many of us still find ourselves in. We’ve become used to remote working, though some of us want to go back to the office. Our expectations around work/life balance have changed. We’re looking forward to the end of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean we want to wind back the clock to exactly the way things were before.

A new approach

Which is why you might have started hearing the term ‘hybrid working’ bandied about recently. It’s a new way of working that advocates a semi-remote approach, and generally means employees spend some of the week (post-Covid) in the office, and some of it working at home or elsewhere. It’s likely to prove popular. In Vaioni’s own post-Covid home working survey, only 8% of respondents said staff would continue to work from home all of the time after the pandemic, but 60% said their businesses would adopt a hybrid model.