OP-ED: Adapt, be flexible, and trust your employees

In this current, candidate’s market, workplaces need to be adaptable to the wants and needs of their employees. Flexibility, empathy, trust and communication are critical in creating an excellent hybrid working environment, says Wisr’s Head of Employee Experience, Kate Renner.

By Kate Renner

Hybrid working is no longer a perk but an expectation in most corporate environments. To become remote-work ready, workplaces need to consider what aspects of an in-office workplace they value and find ways to translate this into a hybrid environment. 

Gone are the days of a traditional 9-5, Monday-Friday office-based work week. Employees are foregoing the professional status-quo for a more flexible environment that can be tailored to suit their individual needs. 

Flexibility, empathy, trust, and communication are critical in creating an excellent hybrid working environment.

At Wisr, our permanent flexible working environment encourages staff to balance their personal and professional lives, boosting productivity and job satisfaction. 

For a thriving remote-work environment, communication is key. With the correct infrastructure in place, your workplace can maintain the same level of communication and inclusion as a traditional office environment.

Optimising connectivity and communication begins with identifying the key channels for communication that your employees most value and then implementing the necessary software. 

To promote inclusion for staff who choose to work remotely, Wisr is big on Zoom etiquette. We practice this by ensuring that all company-wide, in-office celebrations or announcements have a digitally screened component and engage remote staff in an interactive way.

This includes active participation on Zoom, asking remote staff for feedback, and structuring Wisr’s social events to enable remote participation. We also encourage our People Leaders to make a conscious effort to make remote workers feel included when in-person team events occur. For example, sending a food delivery voucher when a catered lunch takes place in the office.

Wisr’s hybrid model enables us to keep our talent (e.g. staff who want to move out of the cities or change states) and can also hire talent from anywhere in Australia and, in some cases, globally. Throughout fully-remote working and our current hybrid model, Wisr has delivered 23 quarters of consecutive loan growth, and our staff eNPS is 87.

To encourage employee productivity and wellness, I recommend businesses to implement initiatives that are available both digitally and in-person to support the mental health and personal and professional development of staff. At Wisr, these initiatives include Udemy for e-learning and Uprise for mental health support. These resources encourage balance, staff wellness, retention, and productivity. 

Ultimately, the workplace of the future is hybrid. Employers need to consider how to keep their staff engaged, satisfied and productive, as holding on to high-performing employees is crucial to the ongoing success of any business. The current dialogue demonstrates that employees want flexibility, and workplaces need to be receptive to this.

Wisr is Australia's first neo-lender and FinTech pioneer in the rapidly growing Australian consumer finance market.

The opinions expressed are of the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of WorkRemoteBetter.