The Secret Sauce for Hybrid Work Success: Four Principles You Need to Know

Hybrid or remote work situations are becoming the norm for tech companies and businesses in other industries. Whether employees want to travel or simply enjoy the flexibility offered by these arrangements, managers, especially those with more experience working in an office as opposed to online, encounter the many challenges of organizing effective work in a hybrid work environment.

Teams can be distributed not only physically across time and space but generationally as well. Today, Generations X, Y, and Z share the workforce, each bringing their understanding of work and the value they attach to a company and employment. Tech leaders need a strategy to overcome the challenges of work in the 21st century to focus teams on a single goal and create products and solutions that bring value to users and clients.

It is not a secret that building effective hybrid teams presents plenty of challenges. Yet, this arrangement has many advantages that a business can harness to enhance performance. We will examine the problems of the hybrid work model and then the benefits.

Challenges

• Communication gaps: Some employees are in the office, while others are remote. Miscommunication and delays in information sharing may occur, especially if teams rely heavily on in-person interactions.
• Collaboration difficulties: Remote employees may feel disconnected from spontaneous in-office brainstorming sessions or collaboration, which could impact team cohesion and innovation.
• Cybersecurity risks: Managing secure access to sensitive company data across various remote networks can increase the complexity of cybersecurity measures.
• Work-life balance: Without proper strategies and plans, the lack of boundaries between work and personal life can lead to burnout for some employees.
• Inequity in opportunities: In-office employees may have more visibility and access to career growth opportunities than their remote colleagues.

Benefits

• Increased flexibility: A hybrid model lets employees accommodate different work styles and improves job satisfaction and productivity.
• Wider talent pool: Tech companies can hire talent from anywhere, not just where their offices are located, increasing the diversity and skills available within the company.
• Cost savings: Hybrid models allow companies to reduce overhead costs such as office space, utilities, and commuting expenses.
• Improved employee retention: Employees tend to appreciate the flexibility of hybrid work models, which can result in higher retention rates and reduced turnover.
• Business continuity: A hybrid model makes it easier for companies to adapt to disruptions to ensure operations continue smoothly regardless of external conditions.

Fun fact: A mid-size IT services company reduced its office space by 30% and saved $1.2 million annually with a hybrid work model.

Enji grew from Mad Devs, a remote-first company, and we have adopted the same policy for our team. Enji brings together talent across borders to create value for clients. The Enji team understands these challenges firsthand, so we know how to build effective hybrid and remote teams.

There are lots of lists and articles explaining how to build effective hybrid work cultures and arrangements. They are great, but we want to be concise and focus on four principles we follow to maintain a healthy work environment and build transparency with a team spread across the globe. We consider them to be the primary principles of successful software development.

This principle does not mean controlling employees or using the newest software to track productivity for remote employees. A leader keeps things in order when they know what is happening without interfering in the work processes. Data is at the heart of this.

Data comes from teams, and this is only possible when everyone follows the same processes. It allows leaders to find roadblocks and optimize steps to boost performance quickly.

Hunches are great, but there are times when they are not enough. Data provides signals to fix a problem while it is small. Leaders who make data-decision decisions boost employee confidence and define clear rules that everyone knows.

The Enji team believes software engineers are responsible for creating quality software that improves the world and makes work and life easier. When employees know their work is valued and understand the metrics used to measure performance, they feel responsible, and leaders can instill this principle in their teams.

It should be no surprise that a company founded on the four principles above aims to support other businesses in following them as well. These are more than guidelines or helpful tips. They form the very essence of what Enji is as a product. Every feature exists to help leaders keep things in order, establish and maintain disciplined processes, make data-driven decisions, and instill a sense of responsibility in their employees.

Enji boasts groups of features that make our principles a reality:

AI features

Enji's AI Copilot, Summarizer, and Employee Pulse features help leaders keep things in order and maintain their hybrid teams' focus on strategic goals without spending time on unnecessary meetings and interference. The information these AI features gather is given to management to make data-driven decisions.

Financial features

Enji provides leaders with financial metrics to make data-driven decisions on how to invest a business's resources for strategic growth. The worklogs feature instills a sense of responsibility among team members when they know their work matters while also creating disciplined processes that everyone follows to drive performance.

Code metrics and task activity

Enji also finds data in business code metrics, engineers' code metrics, and task metrics that support keeping things in order and responsibility. Leaders can use these features as signals for project roadblocks and to see employees' challenges.

Alerts and pro-active bots

Effectively using time is essential when teams are spread across time zones. Enji's standups, status checks, and alerts features help leaders maintain disciplined teams with a shared sense of responsibility without time-consuming meetings.

Our team regularly improves these features based on user feedback and new ideas. Enji's clients have put them to use to boost efficiency and build performance-based hybrid work environments.

Enji has succeeded in helping companies achieve more from their hybrid teams and focus resources on performance-based growth. Here is a list of businesses that believe in our principles.

Enji was born at Mad Devs, a service company that promotes hybrid and remote work, and has since become an inseparable part of the company’s work culture. Mad Devs’ management uses Enji to make strategic budgeting and pricing decisions because the product helps them see the company in numbers. Recently, Mad Devs achieved ISO 9001:2015 certification, which would not have been possible without the disciplined processes and transparency built by Enji.

Mad Devs saw improvements in other areas as well:

• A 90% increase in executive accounting efficiency because Enji automatically collects data that leaders use to see which projects and employees were profitable and which were not.
• Doubled the average customer lifespan with Enji’s transparent and accurate performance data that improved customer trust.
• Optimized bench and employee resource planning with Enji’s comparison of the time and cost of past features and projects to create data-driven plans for new clients.

Another company that has used Enji to its benefit is Сlutch.co, which started using Enji in 2023 to enhance its development processes. Like Mad Devs, Clutch’s teams work in a hybrid environment, separated by several time zones, which can hamper effective scaling. Nevertheless, the company’s management did not give up and put Enji to work to find ways to optimize their work.

• Clutch doubled team productivity by using Enji to help engineers prioritize tasks and streamline communication. Management sees team activity without meetings.
• The company cut weekly meeting time cut in half from 30 hours when Enji helped management identify inefficient communication practices.
• Leaders avoid unpleasant budget surprises with Enji’s data that shows how development project fits into their budget and how much certain features will cost in the future.

The benefits and growing popularity of a hybrid working model are reason enough to consider this change in your business. It can increase employee satisfaction, save money, and allow a company to benefit from an expanded talent pool. However, the challenges of how to sustain company culture in a hybrid work model remain. Enji is meeting these challenges and giving tech and business leaders the tools to keep things in order with teams whose members are in an office and across the globe. Mad Devs and Clutch.co are two examples of companies that have put Enji to work to drive performance and create effective hybrid work environments.