Remote or Hybrid? Which is the winner?

"Working remotely until 30.05.2021", "Enrollment for hot desks 25.01-29.01". These are some of the more popular messages to employees. Will we go back to the office, or will remote work stay with us for longer, perhaps we should equip our homes with a comfortable chair and efficient Internet?

Let's start by explaining what the term hybrid work, popular in recent months, is. It can be an individual choice for employees - they themselves choose when to work at home and when to work at the office. Rotational - a division into subteams that change after a certain period of time and, at the very end, permanent teams - working only remotely or only in the office.

The pandemic has forced even the most resistant to switch to home office. At Rocksoft, the transition to remote mode has not been as problematic as it was, for example: smaller companies not running on online collaboration tools. We are used to video calls with employees or customers, we operate on Teams, Slack, we save everything in the cloud. We have moved our joint breaks online, we even celebrated a birthday this way recently.

Before writing this article, we did a survey among our employees. Here are the results:

58% are satisfied with remote work
23% prefer home office type work
19% would permanently like to work in an office
On LinkedIn, industry discussion groups, it is common to see statements that employers do not trust employees - they use a lot of control, they were not prepared for the move to work from home, they do not have a well-equipped workplace.

IT companies, corporations dealing largely with consulting as well as recruiting, which are practically only remote, are slowly abandoning 100% office work.

Why?

Cost reduction - office maintenance, space rental, employees save on commuting, companies at the beginning of the pandemic gave up benefits
Employees from the Internet - remote work allows to hire people from all over the country as well as the world.
Greater productivity - employees have more freedom to do their work.
The last reason sounds promising, but isn't it better to decide for yourself by looking at your aptitude as well as your capabilities? Of course, working from home can be effective, but only if it is well programmed.

It is worth asking ourselves at the very end: how have we prepared our employees for remote work and how do we support them in these unusual circumstances?