A hybrid work model is the blending of in-office and remote work. An employee in this model may divide their time between commuting to the office and working from other locations. Alternatively, a hybrid work model may also involve a mix of full-time remote and fully on-site employees. Explore additional hybrid work topics:
Explore additional hybrid work topics:
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Hybrid work is a relatively new concept. With the rapid rise of remote work as well as the numerous real-time, cloud-based collaboration tools that enable it, the term now most often refers to a working arrangement that involves splitting work time between:
Although not every organization is able or willing to adopt a hybrid work model, many companies have at least considered it as a way of striking a balance between office work culture and meeting employee expectations for greater flexibility.
A well-structured hybrid work model—one where a typical workweek includes a few days on site and the rest remote—can be ideal for collaboration, productivity, and the employee experience. However, getting hybrid work right requires careful attention to how applications are accessed, especially beyond the four walls of an organization’s offices. Secure internet access, zero trust security, and other protective mechanisms are essential for a successful hybrid workplace.
In either case, hybrid work deployments are all about flexibility. They’re meant to provide a “best of both worlds” setup that optimizes:
In theory, hybrid work has been viable ever since employees were first able to work from home. As more companies offer remote and hybrid roles, employees have flocked to those roles. Now that employees expect roles to be hybrid, more companies are offering this option. Simultaneously, a proper supporting toolset has emerged in the cloud, one that’s capable of being easily ported and used across hybrid work locations.
Undoubtedly, cloud-based applications have been vital to the rise of hybrid work:
Many company executives seized the golden opportunity presented to them by these cloud, web, and virtual applications to enable remote work, and from there, hybrid work. Because 100% remote work is not necessarily the best or only option for many organizations—either because they wish to maintain an office presence or think it’s good for productivity and collaboration to have some face time—hybrid work has become a happy medium between the office and the home.
Remote work has grown significantly since the early 2000s, when it was still a fringe practice for most organizations. Employees who couldn’t commute, lived very far from a company’s main location, and/or were offered the rare option for remote work were the only members of the remote workforce until the late 2010s.
Now that remote work is much more extensive, organizations have sought ways to integrate it more deeply into their overall operations and employee experience.
Some have done so by going fully remote. However, hybrid work is prevalent in many industries and still gives employees more flexibility in choosing where and how they work. In this way, hybrid work is becoming the future of work.
Hybrid work is a superset of remote work; it includes everything practiced under remote work and then adds in some on-site components. Accordingly, a remote workforce can be incorporated into a hybrid work model. Let’s look at how hybrid work and remote work stack up.
Hybrid work has distinct advantages and disadvantages compared to remote work. Allowing a remote workforce to work in the office some of the time can be a potential boon to collaboration. Or, it can be a drag on productivity if secure access isn’t properly facilitated and there’s no clear-cut hybrid work policy.
Under a hybrid work model, on-site and remote workforces both need secure application access that does not diminish the employee experience. Secure access solutions from Citrix help organizations strike the balance between productivity and security:
