Throughout the pandemic, almost every organisation was forced to adopt a fully remote approach to working. Many of these businesses found that this disruption was nowhere near as bad as they originally anticipated and that many workers preferred the opportunity to work from home.
As organisations continue to reopen their offices, the majority intend to adopt a “hybrid workplace” model, which combines in-person and remote work with varying levels of employee choice on when and where they work each week.
Companies are currently considering the advantages of remote, hybrid, and flexible work arrangements because many employees want to continue working from home whilst others are eager to return to the office.
A remote workforce’s productivity has been demonstrated during the pandemic, and businesses are now considering the financial advantages of office closures or staff reductions. However, converting to a hybrid workplace as a standard operating procedure requires more than simply amending an HR policy.
As businesses implement this strategy, it has significant ramifications for IT and is transforming the role it plays. IT is now being asked to take on new challenges for the organisation to succeed in a post-pandemic world.
The modern IT department is now expected to not only handle every digital transformation initiative, but also the daily technology operations associated with remote working tools.
One of the main goals of a modern IT department is to direct the technical capability needed to create hybrid workplaces that are practical, efficient, and collaborative while protecting sensitive data.
IT Takes Center Stage
Hybrid working is behind this shift in the role of IT departments. In the past, offices served as workplaces, and only a small number of employees required help with remote work. Every device used by office workers was physically present on-site, which also commonly housed servers and networks.
IT specialists could easily go to an employee’s location to help when they had a problem. The same was true for new hires, who had their computers and laptops provisioned and set up locally. Although the cloud and employees’ propensity for BYOD (bring your own device) added complexity, IT Operations were still primarily “in-house.”
Enter the pandemic, which forced remote working and drove the recent trend of office closures. IT was abruptly thrust into the spotlight with only days to get people up and running as safely as possible with the programs, permissions, and collaboration tools required to keep business flowing — not to mention keeping the entire organization secure.
Following the pandemic, organisations are once again looking to IT to make hybrid workplaces a reality. But more than simply technical supervision and upkeep will be needed for this. The fundamental nature of IT’s function within the company is changing as a result. How? We’ve narrowed it down to three approaches as listed below:
1) IT Must Lead the Hybrid Workplace Strategy
While management decides to implement a hybrid workplace, IT must oversee the development of a strategy for how employees will alternate between remote and in-office work. The location-indifferent character of hybrid workforces can be supported in many ways by implementing a work-from-anywhere technology strategy, but it’s more nuanced than that.
The impact on servers, networks, VPNs, cloud usage, etc., as well as security, device management, permissions, internet bandwidth, collaboration tools, applications, corporate-owned vs. BYOD rules, and unified communications choices, are all factors that must be considered. Security is the main concern in all areas because employees typically use whichever device, whether it belongs to the company or not, that best suits their needs. This includes coming up with workarounds when company policies seem overly complicated, constrictive, or they simply don’t like a particular app.
Only IT can truly show the way forward in a way that gives workers the necessary degree of freedom and flexibility to do their work wherever they are while protecting company data and maintaining ownership of intellectual property.
2) IT Must Become an Interactive Partner with Departments and Employees
Employees used to only contact IT for technical assistance or to resolve a problem; when everything was going smoothly, IT vanished into thin air. IT will need to transition into an engaged partner role with much more collaboration and involvement in employees’ everyday life in order to support hybrid workplaces.
Why? Because to truly support a hybrid employee, IT will need to collaborate with them and their departments so they can comprehend which IT technologies and applications enable the greatest workflows, promote a pleasant employee experience, and offer additional support for workers who work atypical hours.
Support is especially important for remote workers because they can’t ask their coworkers in the next cubicle for assistance while they’re having problems. To manage more internal customer assistance on a larger scale than ever before, not to mention after hours, IT organisations will need to develop.
3) IT Must Take a Platform Approach in Supporting Hybrid Employees’ Tech Needs
The devices, infrastructure, apps, and networking tools required by an organization to enable a hybrid workplace cannot be supplied by a single vendor because each organization is unique and needs a different combination of resources to ensure the success of its workforce. Nevertheless, despite the differences across IT resources, they all share some traits that can be used to unify and centralize their management. These traits include open, extendable protocols that enable bidirectional communication between dispersed resources and a common management platform.
This platform approach offers IT teams the freedom they require to support their businesses in the way they should be supported, while also enabling scalable, predictable workflows that connect users to the resources they require in a frictionless and safe manner. IT teams have everything they need to connect the two pieces of the puzzle—the resource an end user wants and a central platform to control access to it—by using open protocols as the framework for this platform. The platform can enclose the operational and security advantages it offers around a resource as long as the resource itself (be it a device, application, cloud environment, on-premises file system, or something else) supports an open protocol.
Many IT departments will discover that they are once again thrust into something that is already happening as hybrid workspaces are being developed. IT can provide the deeper assistance and larger scope required to genuinely make hybrid workplaces a success by being cognizant of how the new workplace standard impacts IT’s role in the organization.
Want to learn more about how our team of IT experts can help convert your organisation into an effective hybrid workplace? Contact us today to find out more.
