The Hybrid Working Environment
It’s no surprise that remote working has seen a rise in popularity over the past 3 years. Improved productivity, healthier work/life balance, better mental health – just a few benefits that a hybrid-working schedule can offer – and just a few reasons why so many companies have made the shift to providing hybrid-working opportunities.
Employees that work hybrid schedules often find themselves working from various locations. Their own home. The local café. Hotels across the world. A client’s site. For this reason, it’s important that, no matter where they are connecting from, workers can access all the applications and files they need to go abouts their workdays, in a secure, efficient, and effective way.
This may be just the beginning of the hybrid-working revolution, though. With so many benefits for both the employer and employee, many companies have their eyes set on shifting to infrastructure that supports working hybrid. Those that have made the change to hybrid have reaped the rewards of higher talent acquisition, staff retention, and overall improved access to a higher number of potential employees thanks to the removal of geological restrictions.
However, finding the right solution(s) can be a daunting task. With so many different options available to build your hybrid-working suite, it can be difficult to find the best tech that truly suits your business’s specific needs.
The Journey to Hybrid Working
Of course, every company is at a different stage of their hybrid work journey. Comprising of a sample of 1,430 global respondents (representing companies with 250 to 5,000+ employees across 20 industry sectors), Cisco, partnered with IDC, conducted and designed research to fuel key insights into hybrid work initiatives, to construct what Cisco have coined ‘The Hybrid Work Maturity Model’. They found that there are 4 types of organisations:
Hybrid Work Observers (7%): Organisations that are beginning to explore different hybrid-work models but still work mainly within the office.
Hybrid Work Adopters (47%): Organisations that are beginning to invest in technology, enabling them to operate hybrid.
Hybrid Work Champions (38%): Organisations that have introduced hybrid work in specific departments and are seeing improved business outcomes but are yet to introduce hybrid work throughout the whole organisation.
Hybrid Work Innovators (8%): Organisations that have well-established, company-wide hybrid working policies, and have the technology and capabilities to support a hybrid-first strategy.
From Cisco’s findings and evaluation, it’s clear to see that most organisations are yet to fully embrace hybrid working – with many keen to adopt the necessary technology to support their employee’s work from outside the office.
Why is Hybrid Work so important?
Organisations have seen that the shift to remote work not only increases the speed of digital infrastructure and technology solution adoption but also brings people policies and company culture to the forefront. This shared experience across the workforce changes expectations of employees and employers alike. But how can you evolve traditional on-site and off-site work models by designing the work experience around and for the worker, wherever they are?
For any business to meet its primary aim, it must address the three foremost areas of concern: cybersecurity, productivity, and workforce attraction and retention in the face of an ageing workforce during a wildly competitive market.
So, why is having the capability to provide hybrid work to employees so important?
The new generation of workers will be harder to recruit and will expect a hybrid work environment that demands a more efficient, semi-autonomous operating environment. Here are some stats:
- 75% of hybrid of remote workers say their expectations for working flexibly have increased, with 4 out of 10 stating they may leave their job if they’re required to return to the office full-time (Gartner).
- 69% of global CIOs, IT decision-makers and office workers say that the ability to dictate their own working hours directly affects whether they stay at a job; 64% say the ability to work remotely directly affects whether they stay or leave a job (Cisco, Future of Technology, November 2021)
- 98% of all business meetings will have at least one person joining from a home office (Cisco Global Workforce Survey: The Rise of Hybrid Workplace Report)
To face the future of work with confidence, companies must have in place robust collaboration capabilities that are easy to use, ironclad against cyber threats, and limitless in their scalability.
Making Hybrid Working, Work
The thing is, for many, it’s not exactly clear what technology is most optimal for their hybrid working infrastructure. That’s where we can help. Every unique business faces unique challenges. Unique challenges require unique solutions. We’ll help you find the perfect solution for your business and its specific challenges.
Whether it’s ensuring that your staff are accessing company files securely, utilising a zero-trust network, building SASE architecture, creating cloud infrastructure to host and supply applications and files, setting up company-wide 2FA and VPNs, or even supplying the appropriate machines for your staff to do what they do best – with a team of skilled experts, unique relationships with world leading tech providers, and a global logistics network that enables us to deliver to almost anywhere in the world, we can find and build the best solution for you.
