After more than a year of working from home, employees are slowly beginning to return to their long-vacant offices, and emotions are mixed. Although many are looking forward to replacing countless Zoom meetings with more face-to-face time with colleagues, they are hesitant to leave behind all the benefits realized by working remotely, including no commute and more time with family. Some workers have enjoyed remote work so much that they would turn down a $30,000 raise to continue working remotely.

To bring together the best of both worlds, many companies are considering shifting to hybrid work environments. By transitioning to a hybrid office, you can attract top talent by offering all the perks of remote work while still maintaining the culture-building and connection that a physical office provides. Here is what you need to consider to successfully roll out a hybrid work environment for your organization.

Don’t Rush a Return

After an extremely stressful year and a half of pandemic restrictions, health concerns, and employment uncertainty, it is likely that many of your employees are not feeling comfortable jumping back into office mode immediately. This is an important time to connect with your team and to understand their sentiments about remote work and in-office work. 

Preferences for what a hybrid work structure looks like will vary across teams and company cultures, so don’t rush back into the office and a hybrid work setup without input from your employees. Develop an understanding of how often employees want to be back in the office, and for what occasions. If the majority of your employees express a preference for only being in the office two days a week, you might want to consider downsizing and prioritizing collaborative spaces over dedicated desks for every employee.

Communication is Key

Following the pandemic, open and honest communications from employers have become more important to workers than ever. After so much rapid change and uncertainty, employees don’t want to be left in the dark regarding plans for returning to the office.

If you are planning to transition to a hybrid office, make sure your leadership team is showing support for both remote work and in-office work through their language and actions. Don’t frame reopening offices as a “return to work,” implying your team hasn’t been busily working from home for over a year! Communicate that flexibility is now a core principle, and that there is trust in employees to find the work arrangement that is best for them.

Set Clear Expectations

With a hybrid office, new challenges will emerge around how to best manage and coordinate your workforce. It was easy enough to get everyone online for a virtual meeting, but what happens when employees are in the office and at home in different combinations?

These new challenges make clear expectations vital to the successful rollout of a hybrid work environment. “Flexible work” doesn’t mean no rules: develop clear guidelines for things like work hours, the use of statuses (online, do not disturb) for remote workers, and specific strategies for culture building within a distributed workforce. 

Although implementing a hybrid office environment brings challenges, the benefits are clear: employees value flexibility, and a well-implemented hybrid workforce strategy will give your organization new access to high talent remote workers, and help you retain your best employees.