Four Tips to Optimize Your Consultancy in a Hybrid Workplace

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Four Tips to Optimize Your Consultancy in a Hybrid Workplace

By: Kimberly Sack, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Deltek

Let’s face it, operating in a hybrid model is the way of the future for many consulting firms. While key consulting practices have remained the same, the way that daily business is conducted has transformed the way we think and work. Consulting leaders need to enable their teams with the right infrastructure and processes while maintaining company culture to ensure success in a hybrid environment.

Here are four tips to help optimize your consultancy for hybrid success:

1. Embrace the Importance of Workplace Culture. From hiring employees to collaborating and efficiently delivering high-quality engagements and projects, it is key to determine how you’re going to maintain and build out the right culture when working remotely. This idea must be integrated throughout all processes of how you interact with your employees, making changes or modifications to basic HR processes, if necessary, to accommodate those needs.

2. Prioritize Communication with Customers and Employees. According to the 2021 Hinge High Growth Study, 51% of respondents said communications with clients and prospects is the most affected business process in the last year. Consider the impact that the reduction of face-to-face interactions has had on your business. The way firms and clients have pivoted and are now delivering their services will continue to evolve, and it is important to continuously evaluate processes and the overall impact on client and employee satisfaction.

3. Implement the Right Technology to Enable Success. Regardless if your team has already been partly remote or is now moving in that direction, it is crucial to ensure that they are enabled to safely and efficiently work in a hybrid environment. This includes building the proper infrastructure, implementing the right technology tools and creating a secure environment to protect both the employees and the firm’s sensitive information. Consultancies need to think about how technology impacts business processes from managing resources to project delivery and invoicing, and security of sensitive data needs to be a top priority. Consulting leaders and Chief Information Security Officers should take the time to perform a full audit on users’ access to systems, applications and data across the entire enterprise and identify weak areas in visibility over users’ access to any corporate resource.

4. Prepare Your Office for a Safe Return. Every firm has a different approach to how they are moving towards returning to on-site working. The main priorities on leaders’ minds is to look out for all employee’s best interests and for the return to be done safely. Many firms are re-imagining how they utilize their office spaces to be an added value for their employees. Whether your firm decides to transform its office into a collaboration space or reduce the office footprint to enhance the quality of at home offices for employees, the shift to a hybrid model has leaders thinking of better working experience for all employees.

By taking the right steps, and continuously providing visibility and accessibility your firm’s transition to the hybrid model will increase overall success and growth.

And Speaking of Hybrid Success

Join me as I speak with Sean McDermott, CEO of Windward Consulting, about these and other immediate actions consulting leaders are taking in order to achieve long term success in the new remote consulting environment.

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