Find Your Flow - Different Ways of Working

An increasing number of people across the world are now seeking to work remotely or within a hybrid working model where they can enjoy the best of both worlds.

Remote working has brought about an increase in productivity, higher employee satisfaction and a boost in customer satisfaction.As a result, many businesses plan to make hybrid working their future everyday, which brings the challenge of how to manage people working in multiple different locations at once.

No organisation is the same. And the makeup of your workforce will likely change from one year to the next. That said, we’ve included three typical scenarios below that most employers can probably relate to.

Your people mostly work from home or wherever they’re most productive. You don’t need a big office space, but you might have hubs for face-to-face meetings.

Treat cybersecurity and connectivity as one.

Unless you already worked for a tech startup with the vowels removed from its name, the sudden move to mass remote working in March 2020 likely came as a shock to your organisation and while it hasn’t hindered productivity, employee engagement or the customer experience , there are still a lot of things to consider if this is to be your long-term way of working.

Aside from the obvious obstacles like pets and children interrupting meetings, one of the biggest challenges organisations face is giving people quick and easy access to the applications and data they need at all times, wherever they’re logging in from.

If your connectivity is not inherently secure, your organisation could be at serious risk of an expensive, reputation-damaging data breach.

Make sure cybersecurity works for your least tech-savvy Employee.

Human error – clicking on a phishing link, for example – is one of the most common causes of data breaches. Employees are also less likely to follow safe data practices while working from home and home networks are 3.5 times more likely than a corporate network to have at least one malware family, there are more opportunities for human error to occur.

If security doesn’t work for your people it’s just an expensive unlocked door. It needs to be simple, easy, intuitive – baked into your network and all the tools that run on it. 

In a hybrid working world, the only way to keep data safe without slowing anyone down is by taking a zero trust approach, i.e. moving away from trying to secure your whole network at once and instead looking at individual users.

You ask people to be in the office at least two or three days a week, but beyond that you leave it up to them.

Make collaboration effortless

When lockdown hit in March 2020 the focus was on enabling everyone to work from home. It was new, uncharted territory for many organisations but while it was a challenge, the fact that everyone was working in the same way made things relatively straightforward.

Now, as many Organisations move to a hybrid approach with a mix of remote and office-based workers on any given day, a new challenge is arising: How do you make work feel seamless when you’ve got a bunch of people in the same room and a bunch more spread out in various other locations?

If you’ve ever been the only one dialling in to a meeting room full of people, you’ll understand the weight of this question.There’s no easy answer, of course. Every Organisation is different but cloud and unified communications is the key to making things happen as smoothly as possible.

Help your people thrive in a hybrid working world

One of the biggest headaches organisations are dealing with now is the sheer number of new workplace tools they’ve had to adopt. This has created an enormous amount of complexity and many Organisations are turning to cloud-based platforms that can join up all these disparate apps and services and all their associated data in one place, otherwise known as unified communications.

This makes life much simpler for your employees, empowering them to be more productive and collaborate better at home, in the office or wherever they happen to be, which in turn will allow them to serve your customers in a more consistent and personal way and talented people are now looking at ways of working as a major deciding factor when choosing a job. A cloud-based approach can help you meet their expectations and be more competitive as an employer.

You prefer people to work in the office. Or perhaps it’s required for their roles. But you still need to enable remote working when it’s necessary.

Pave the way for faster, easier change

The word ‘change’ has become something of an overused marketing buzzword in the wake of Covid-19. But for good reason. The pandemic has accelerated digital progress tremendously across the globe but while much of the conversation seems to centre around remote or hybrid working (a mix of remote and office-based work), there are plenty more opportunities to do things differently and tech is the enabler of that.

For Organisations in which large scale remote working simply isn’t an option, the focus should instead be on enabling new digital services for employees and customers and making sure you have the connectivity to cater for those services.That means adopting a cloud-based network that’s powerful enough to support new tools, flexible enough to allow rapid change and secure enough to help you sleep at night.

It’s time to leave the 90s behind

Traditional networks have hardly changed in 20 years but everything around them has. Today people work from different places, at all different times, on multiple devices. They need to instantly access data whenever and wherever they want and increasingly that data is in the cloud.

The network that was fit for purpose all those years ago can no longer cope. Cloud-based connectivity is more efficient and flexible than traditional infrastructure, which means it can support new data-hungry digital tools and services while giving you the ability to make quick and easy changes to your technology and infrastructure (even if you decide to move to more of a hybrid working approach in future, for example) but that connectivity has to be inherently secure because cybersecurity and connectivity are like wings: if they don’t come as a pair, you might as well have neither.

Whether most of your employees are working from home, most are in the office or something in between, you need to make three things happen to achieve an effective hybrid workforce: