Future of Remote Work

The phrase “Work From Home “(WFH) has become common parlance in everyday life. Early 2019 was easy going, and the economy and businesses were blooming, and start-ups were flourishing. Suddenly the whole world was pushed into the dark by COVID-19. The spread of the virus led to a rapid shift in organizations moving to a WFH model and relying on remote work tools now more than before.

Many SMBs and large enterprises alike shifted their workforce permanently to a remote working model. The employees use the VPN-based traditional infrastructures, legacy collaboration tools to perform regular work. The remote work trends will double as we go. There are pros and cons of remote work, but it is the organization’s choice to deploy the right tools and technologies to make this more impactful. Remote work opens doors for many technological advancements and the development of existing workspace tools and security parameters.

Those who adopted remote work solutions must review the workforce’s productivity and its impact. The organization must take a survey from their workforce on the remote work in terms of user experience, security, ease of using tools, stay up to date on their work, and reducing meeting fatigue.

Digital meetings

Many government sector workers, retail workers, restaurants, and hospital staff never stopped working during the pandemic. These frontline warriors must connect to the rest of their team and stay up to date on the job. It’s a primary goal of an organization to provide flexibility in choosing their platforms to communicate from anywhere. Hence the need for organizations to switch to a cloud-powered solution.

Apart from enabling face time with stakeholders, the platform must enable an omnichannel experience to connect and collaborate. Flexible work is here to stay, and organizations need to empower their employees to work, learn, and collaborate from home, home office, or anywhere in the world.

What do employees expect?

As we pass through the black-swan event, the future of remote work should be dynamic and fluid. The technology behind the remote work should be cloud-enabled, giving the power to connect anywhere and anytime. Digital meetings of the future will be intelligent, and AI-enabled tools help monitor the action items.

Employee experience

Many employees work remotely, and the support system is also in place, ensuring employees’ hardware and software are running smoothly from an IT perspective. Here, many organizations fail to understand the end-user requirements and require a new workplace engagement attitude. Below are essential factors that could help to elevate the end-user experience for an organization.

Cloud-powered solution for everyone

The chat, call, communicate, and collaboration features from a single platform help users reduce meeting fatigue and focus on the business strategy. The adoption of cloud-powered solutions can elevate user experience. In remote work culture accessing desktops and applications could be challenging, leading to passivity in productivity. Employees often access multiple apps every day. Developer apps, monitoring apps, finance apps, and others. The constant switching among apps also impacts employee productivity. The modern workplace comes with a persona-based workspace with custom apps integrated. End-users no longer must navigate, and this integration can reduce context switching between applications enhancing user productivity.

Cloud-powered platforms beneficial for on-demand scaling and the IT team to monitor where and how resources are used and utilized. The IT team can collect monitoring data to proactively address potential issues, a win-win situation for both end-users and administrators.

Applications and hardware for end-users

Till today many remote workers are ill-equipped with applications, hardware, and network connectivity. The organization and end-user must employ better communication and collaboration tools to achieve optimal user experience. The IT team in the organization must do a survey and make a concrete decision on what types of gear and application to make available to remote workers and analyze what end-users are trying to accomplish.

If organizations deploy complex, hard-to-use applications, employees or end-users become frustrated. Many users spare time searching the applications and completing routine tasks. Most of the typical applications are SaaS apps, web apps, and Windows apps that are accessed through the browser. Every application may require sign-in credentials, and this entire process leads to depletion in employee productivity.

The next-gen workplace with a single unified experience brings all apps and desktops together in a single window. Each user or user group can have personalized intelligent feeds and end context switching and reduce complexity in applications.

Security for everyone

Security is at a great inflection point as a new wave of digital transformation accelerates. The rapid shift in remote work has left many organizations scrambling to institute security protocols and policies across all the business units. There is no streamlined process and policies implemented in the organization; hence remote workers are becoming the first to face security threats. Even though many sectors don’t have remote employees, their own devices like mobiles and personal laptops could pose security risks.

The business risk comes in many forms, and a siloed approach can open the door for bad actors. The recent cyberattack on a leading American multinational company was an example. The event leads to changing our perception towards security and advancing our security system in the organization. Zero trust is the cornerstone of implicit protection and a foundation for security that strengthens an organization’s business growth. To start with the Zero Trust journey, here listed down a few critical facets and areas that every organization need to focus on:

• Protecting user identity
• Device health
• Assess your security posture
• Strengthen compliance posture
• Security Certifications

Find out how the Zero Trust Security approach elevates the security posture of an organization.

Modern approach for remote workplace

As the global workforce transitions to remote work, an advanced technology touch to a remote workplace is evolving at lightning speed. Employees need the right digital tools to encourage productivity, engagement, and collaboration. The modern workplace solution embedded with unique technologies brings the virtual team and virtual leadership on the same boat. Hence organizations can manage virtual teams effectively by optimizing the overall output.

Integrating the cloud-powered solution, Internet of Things, and AR and VR give employees more opportunities to work remotely and efficiently. The future of remote work will be built on technological advancement and pave way for the development of existing tools.

Our upcoming blog will dive into the factors contributing to remote work and how the brownfield environment can be reshaped by inculcating advanced technologies. Meanwhile, we would want to hear your opinion; till then, stay tuned.