To be or not to be… in the office?
What if I told you that your office was holding your organization back? Well, it is probably TRUE. In 2020 organizations were removed from their offices, just about overnight. Now, fast forward to 2021 and a lot of organizations are ready to return to their offices. However, some companies like Amazon, Capital One, and Microsoft have opted to stay remote or give the employees the option to work from home permanently. But why would they be doing this?
The advantages of work from home
In 2020 work from home became an essential part of just about every organization no matter the type or size. During this time the advantages of work from home became very apparent to many organizations:
• Location Flexibility: When employees are enabled to work from home successfully anyone in the world can be an employee of your organization and employees that are moving no longer have to leave your organization because of geographic restrictions.
• Accommodating Workspace: With work from home, the employee has more control of the space they are working in which in most cases causes higher morale and productivity.
• Less overhead: With the need to house all employees at once and organizations can downsize their offices cutting down on the cost of maintaining a larger office space.
• Scheduling: Work from home enables people to work on their own schedules to complete tasks. Nine to five isn’t the only option and why should you care you don’t pay employees for their time ( Stay Tuned: more on this in a future post)
There is always a downside
Though work from home has been an asset for most companies it does have its downside. Some of the problems with work from home include:
• More Distraction: For some individuals, the freedom of being in their own space can cause them to lose focus on the task that they need to complete.
• Nontraditional: Work from home isn’t the mindset for most and it’s hard for some to recreate workflows from the office at home.
• Incorrect tooling: With work from home, if the incorrect tooling is in place and business processes aren’t properly put into place it can cause a decrease in productivity by not allowing employees the correct access to company resources they need to effectively do their job.
It’s not always binary
So we know that work from home offers both advantages and disadvantages so should you be preparing for a full return to the office or should you be offering work from home as a permanent solution? Well, the answer isn’t as straightforward as one or the other. At Lockedheart we have been working with our clients so they can offer a third hybrid option that we like to call work from anywhere. Work from anywhere is the idea that you enable your workforce to work the way that they do best. Our work from anywhere strategies helps organizations combine the advantages of work from home and in the office by allowing your organizations’ employees the same tooling and efficiency of being in the office when at home (or anywhere). It also allows for the following:
• Employee Freedom: Every person in your organization is different and works differently. By allowing your employees the option to work from home or the office they have the freedom to work how they do best. Increasing their efficiency and productivity.
• Less Overhead: By allowing some employees to work from home, the office, or both you can downsize your office and make better use of the space by allowing offices to be shared between multiple users
• Location Flexibility: By enabling the right tooling for work from anywhere you give your employees the ability to work well work anywhere. This gives an expanded talent pool for your organizations as well as allows employees to get work done no matter if they need to stay home for a day and wait for the cable installer or have an emergency that doesn’t allow them to come into the office.
Enabling a hybrid workforce
So, work for anywhere strikes a balance between work from home and work in the office and offers a large number of advantages over traditional workforce methodologies but how does an organization become work from anywhere ready. Well, the answer is technology. Technology is at the core of work from anywhere and the technologies you implement can make or break your organization’s work from anywhere experience. That’s why below we have a few technologies we suggest your organization starts with on your journey to a hybrid workforce to make your life that much more simple.
• Hybrid, Cloud, & SaaS: Moving specific workloads to the cloud or onto a software as a service platform can not only reduce the cost of running those workloads but enables them to be available to employees rather they are in the office or not.
• File-Sharing: File sharing platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sharepoint (our favorite) are the heart of work from anywhere and a good file sharing platform allows employees no matter their locations to access, edit, and collaborate on multiple types of documents.
• Single Sign-On and Identity Management: By adding an identity management solution and single sign-on, your organization can make it easier for users to move from one office to another with a single username and password that gives them access to the organizations’ resources they need to do their job.
• Unified Communications (UC): A unified communication suite is backed by a solid voice-over IP solution for voice communications and brings it together with other forms of communication such as interoffice chat or client SMS/MMS. A good platform also integrates into other productivity tools such as Microsoft 365 and Teams and enables users to stay connected to each other and your clientele no matter their device or where they are.
For any questions about any of these technologies give us a call at (470) 440–0548 or email inquiry@lockedheart.tech and stay tuned to our #BreakingTheDomain series on Linkedin and Facebook we will be covering more topics on hybrid work including security, hybrid cloud deployments, and employee device choice.
