2020 and 2021 have been years none of us ever thought we would see within our lifetimes. Lockdowns, quarantines, self-imposed isolation, restructuring business for online platforms, and remote workers; COVID-19 has seen enterprises large, small, and in-between, participate in the biggest remote work experiment in human history. Now, more than a year into the pandemic, we are in a relatively better position to gauge the impact of remote working on how we communicate, connect, and create.
As many pundits, economists, and executives have said, 'there is no going back,' the hybrid workplace is the future. But what exactly does hybrid workplace mean? How is it defined? What does it look like? How flexible is it? And, most importantly, how will it function?
Firstly, a hybrid workplace is a human-centric workplace. In the digital age, knowledge workers are not the only employees who can work from home and/or the office. So-called “anywhere workers” include craftspeople, light industrial workers, service providers, and of course digital-native millennials. According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of knowledge workers will be working remotely. Of those, 80% will be hybrid, splitting their time between home and an office, while 20% will be totally remote. As the U.S. has started to emerge from the pandemic, many traditional 9-5 offices have implemented some form of staggered scheduling, allowing employees to alternate days at the office with remote work days - and according to a Capgemini study, nearly two thirds (63 percent) of employers reported an increase in productivity due to remote work. So, being human-centric and respecting the wishes of employees pays off.
Interestingly enough, respecting employee wishes doesn’t have to mean morale-boosting perks and catering to every whim. People are most productive and work to their best potential when their jobs are enabled by seamless, never-have-to-worry technology. And that tech needs to work the same in remote locales as it does in the office. If your remote employees struggle to access or use tech to the same degree that they have in the workplace, their productivity will suffer. As we have all become accustomed to video conferencing in place of staff meetings, shared documents instead of handmade edits, and more emails than ever before, we have grown dependent on cloud-based technologies and fast internet connections, all of which have to be secure from end-to-end.
According to Microsoft, which looked at year-over-year growth, weekly meeting times for MS Teams users increased 148%. Between February 2020 and February 2021 they saw a 40 billion increase in the number of emails, weekly per person team chats was up 45% (and climbing), and people working on Office Docs increased by 66%. This speaks to the need to further optimize remote interactions to avoid burnout.
All this increased activity poses challenges to remote workers. In the latest State of the WAN report from Aryaka, enterprises ranked the biggest barriers to effective remote / hybrid work as follows:
- Set up and management of underlying network infrastructure (42%)
- Lag / delay in communication (42%)
- Poor voice or video quality (40%)
- Frequently dropped calls (38%)
Only 13 percent of respondents said everything is perfect. With so few “perfect” hybrid workplaces, it’s no wonder enterprises are worried about how to build and manage their technology stack. It boils down to two options: do it themselves through various hardware and software solutions, with a dedicated IT team to troubleshoot and maintain it, or they can take a managed service provider route. DIY does offer some levels of autonomy, but is arguably more complex, and only becomes more complex when one is securely connecting people/branches on a global scale. A managed approach, on the other hand, offers a cloud-first, “as-a-Service” consumption model that features more agility, lower TCO, fewer SLA headaches, and high application performance. It also allows for flexible change management—something that is difficult to undertake in a box-centric model. For this to work best, it definitely helps to look for one-stop-shop service providers that offer their own technology. And make sure you are fully cognizant of how the service provider integrates/stitches together all the key components, their effective global reach, and that they don’t try to lock you in with their services contracts.
The hybrid workplace is already here, and it will be getting more complex as we come to the new “life at the end of the tunnel” from these past two years. If you’ve still not started planning for the future of your hybrid workforce, you might want to start now. When shopping for an enterprise WAN solution, make sure it is one that is flexible, with the ability to adjust bandwidth across sites as needed, support potential surges of remote/hybrid workers, and enables the rapid deployment of cloud-based or other SaaS-based solutions. Investing in a WAN solution that’s geared for the hybrid workforce gives enterprises a safety blanket to weather whatever life throws your way.
