The digital employee experience was completely upended two years ago. Overnight, knowledge work changed from being concentrated in business offices to occurring almost anywhere. This represented a tremendous challenge for IT teams. They had about a week to support thousands of remote workers. Reacting under great pressure, nearly all accomplished this. Now, though, hybrid work—combining work in the office with remote work—is becoming the norm, and those first, reactionary solutions for remote work must give way to a strategic approach that empowers employees with flexibility.
As we move past responding to the short-term crisis, we have an opportunity to build strategic systems that will be central to the business. That will include deploying systems that will entice employees from the numerous individual point products they started using in the absence of good options coming from their employers. In place of those apps, IT must provide a cohesive platform to support hybrid work. No organization can function well when employees are using four different video conference solutions and three file sharing tools, for example. And security is just the most obvious reason why indiscriminate app usage is bad for business. There are also support issues, user productivity problems, and data protection requirements. Yet the transition will not be simple, and IT teams must take care that employees don’t become upset when their favorite apps are no longer supported.
The transition from the crisis mode of two years ago to an operating mode for hybrid work is essential to improving security and meeting compliance and regulatory demands. Deploying a remote work platform that is more secure, resilient, and compliant is mandatory. And security/compliance must be one of the top decision points for platform choice. Many IT teams are getting buy-in for the move away from wide-open user choice to a centralized solution with messaging that stresses security, not only for corporate information, but also to protect the employee. While unusual, some successful attacks against endpoints have resulted in theft of both business and personal data. Most employees keep personal information on their business devices, and improving security will better protect both sets of data.
Speed to solution is an important part of deploying a hybrid work platform. And because this is a singular project that has a finish line, many organizations are leveraging partners to get the job done quickly and with a quality result.