Over the last several years, IT providers have worked overtime to implement a new generation of technology tools for thousands upon thousands of businesses. These tools have totally transformed where, when and how people do their jobs.
Whether by choice or necessity, most companies now offer onsite, remote, or hybrid work models for their employees based on their individual needs and preferences.
While percent remote workplaces continue to be very popular among employees, many organizations are now ramping up “return-to-office” initiatives in an effort to entice many of their offsite employees back into a physical office—at least for a few days a week.
The reasoning varies, but most companies cite their belief that working from the office—at least part of the time—can help improve communication, collaboration and an overall sense of community. However, employee responses to these return-to-work initiatives have remained decidedly mixed. In fact, some employees are willing to take a pay cut (or even find a new job) rather than abandon the flexibility of remote work.
There are many reasons employees find remote work so attractive. There’s the lack of a commute and non-existent dress code, not to mention the flexibility to customize the already blurry work/life balance outside normal 9-to-5 business hours.
But there’s also a technological component to their return-to-office resistance. If you ask them directly, many remote workers will tell you they are just as productive, if not more productive, working from home. In some cases, the data backs up their claims.
Today, a good IT partner can make remote work a very smooth experience for employees; maybe even smoother than the experience they remember the last time they were in the office. So, if stepping back into the office also feels like stepping back in time, their resistance will only get stronger.
With this in mind, here are five modern IT tools and strategies all companies should be integrating into their brick-and-mortar culture if they expect top talent to return to the office.
- Continuous Innovation: Four years ago, zoom calls, slack channels and cloud-based file sharing were cutting edge technology for many workplace cultures. Companies (and their IT solution providers) were forced to learn fast. They should both keep the same mentality when it comes to today’s newest generation of technology tools.
- User Experience Tracking: Moving from remote to onsite work can often create as many IT issues for users as an office-to-home migration. While supporting these users, IT teams should be tracking user sentiment in real-time and establishing XLAs to provide valuable insight into how users really feel about the support they’re getting and the resulting adjustments that need to be made.
- Flexible Support Options: The growing need to support remote employees has spawned a variety of innovative tools designed to dive deep into user devices, identifying the underlying issues and resolving them automatically whenever possible. Intelligent virtual agents (chatbots) have also become popular ways to solve problems remotely. And for those users who like to do it themselves, powerful new self-service tools can help them solve their own problems. All of these tools can (and should) be just as efficient for in-office workers as they have been for remote employees.
- Sophisticated Security: Heightened security measures are a mainstay of work-from-home IT support strategies. But hackers aren’t just targeting remote resources. In fact, many are refocusing back to onsite vulnerabilities. That makes security solutions like DNS proxies, zero trust administration and multi-factor authentication increasingly important inside the office walls.
- Seamless Setup/Configuration: Employees working in the office shouldn’t be penalized with antiquated device setup and configuration workflows. Zero-touch deployment can work just as well in the office as it does in the living room, allowing users to self-configure their own devices with everything they need to be productive on day one.
In the end, there are pros and cons to all workplace structures. Whether you choose a remote, in-person or hybrid approach. It’s the employee experience that will ultimately determine your results.
Whether they log on from the office or from their living room, no employee wants yesterday’s IT infrastructure dragging them down. That means staying ahead of the curve and implementing solutions to ensure workers are able to do their best work, wherever they are.
Check out Pomeroy’s Modern Lifecycle Solutions and Managed Services offerings for details on how you can enhance your employee experience.
