Is Your Business Ready for a Hybrid Future?

Written by Jessica Vernon | Jun 14, 2022 5:18:03 PM

When the pandemic hit, many organizations scrambled to acquire the necessary technology to allow employees to continue to collaborate, share information, and access critical data from home. Some companies piecemealed a few independent communication platforms and collaboration software. Others with in-house IT teams were tasked with supporting a wide variety of home offices and remote work sites on the fly.

The emergency has passed, but new variant waves continue to disrupt plans to return to the office. Companies need to use this transition period to build a strategic plan for standardizing technology across their portfolio and equipping remote workers with enterprise-grade connectivity and security.

- Frost & Sullivan’s, 2021 study, The Hybrid Workforce is Here to Stay found that:

for 35% of companies, adapting to new work models is their top priority, ahead of everything else.
42% of companies expect to have as many as 50% of their employees working from home in the future. Only 4% have no plans to continue to allow remote work.
more than one-third of organizations will be permanently reducing their real-estate footprint and offering staggered workdays and schedules to their employees.

The Challenges of Supporting a Hybrid Workforce

The sudden shift to remote work put stress on every level of every organization, but some departments have been disproportionately burdened with the task of implementing and maintaining a hybrid workforce. Specifically, the situation has caused dramatic shifts in the role of IT and Facilities management.

Facilities Managers have been tasked with reconfiguring office spaces for hot-desking and providing flexible meeting rooms to accommodate ad-hoc collaboration between on-site and WFH teams. These reconfigurations do save space and energy resources but hybrid work has really complicated things for in-house IT staff. Further, the additional IT resources and Artificial Intelligence (AI) required to track occupancy and usage data of these reconfigured office spaces adds yet another management layer for the already overburdened IT departments.

IT Strategy for the New Normal

At a time when uncertainty and cybersecurity risks are at an all-time high for organizations of all types and sizes, our hope is that businesses can apply these recommendations so that they can focus on growth, not recovery.

In order to maximize the effectiveness of your IT budget, Techmenity recommends outsourcing some or all of your IT Services. Techmenity can provide added support for your existing IT team or, we can manage your businesses’ full IT suite. We help businesses big and small customize a cloud-based IT plan, select the right collaborative tools for your teams, and build an IT strategy that addresses four main concerns:

Security: 24/7 monitoring protects against threats no matter where people are working.
Management: Choose tools that are easy to deploy and scale — and that deliver the insights you need.
Flexibility: Plan and prepare for change, embrace unique workstyles, and support your team with the tools and devices they need to thrive.
Scalability: Solutions that enable inclusive, flexible, supportive, secure, and IT-manageable work experiences at scale, and anywhere.

Enterprise Communications and Collaboration—Solutions Landscape

Hybrid offices are the new normal. Businesses need to strategically prioritize their IT budgets in order to stay competitive, ensure a comfortable and efficient working environment, and reduce the risk of financial and brand damages from a data breach.

This article is part of our Hybrid Workplace series:

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