We’ve experienced a seismic shift in the way we access work in the last two years. Innovations that were initially designed as quick fixes to keep businesses operating and employees productive have become largely permanent solutions for an increasingly global and distributed workforce.
The rate of change and need to implement a host of new protocols has presented significant business challenges. On a strategic level, there’s an understanding that hybrid working represents the future. However, McKinsey reveals that 68 per cent of businesses still have no plan in place to realise this hybrid vision, necessitating an important role for IT teams and trusted partners to bridge this gap.
The transition to hybrid working has been far from simple. Organisations will need to bring security practices in-line with national, international and regulatory standards. Yet, maintaining and enhancing frictionless user experiences needs to become a core consideration in this process.
That’s why an increasing number of businesses are turning to skilled partners to help them achieve a balance between hybrid working, security and user-experience.
The basis and the goal
A legacy of the pandemic is the emphasis on security, meaning a user-first experience is no longer the top priority for IT teams. While it might sound counter-intuitive, when seeking ways to improve customer user-experience, the best advice I can offer is to lead with security when speaking to IT buyers.
By moving customers away from the traditional perimeter-based approach, partners are well-placed to help modernise security protocols and keep user-experience at the forefront.
Adopting a zero-trust model can help to inspire this harmony by offering employees secure access to the applications and devices they need, without placing restrictive barriers or explicitly banning their use. Zero-trust means to never automatically trust anything inside or outside a company’s ecosystem, instead requiring verification before allowing application access.
This process of continuous verification and conditional access reduces the attack surface in a way that allows employees to do their job securely while empowering them to do so without barriers. By driving modernisation efforts in this way, partners are helping customers to implement security options that prioritises a user-experience that employees now expect.
Long-term solutions
By leveraging expertise and objectivity not found in-house, partners have a unique ability to provide long-term fixes for some of the temporary solutions introduced at the start of the pandemic. Poorly leveraged solutions, such as VPNs, VDI and surveillance tools – the latter of which 70 per cent of businesses introduced during the pandemic – are causing complaints from employees about inadequate user experience and driving high employee turnover.
Partners can help businesses explore where employee monitoring tools might be appropriate, and more crucially, how they can support productivity and performance.
In the era of hybrid work, employees are increasingly interested in the IT set-up of their organisations and are posing questions around IT policy and monitoring that IT teams haven’t faced before. As such, partners are well-placed to help customers consider their entire IT estate and ensure the experience they offer staff is tailored to retain talent.
Being part of these conversations will not only give partners insight into where the challenges exist, but also encourage customers to consider issues they may be blind to or putting to the bottom of the pile.
Experience-led culture
Partners play an important role in driving purposeful workplace change by providing technical expertise and delivering a profound shift in employee experience.
The implementation of zero-trust security offers employees access to the tools and applications they need to successfully complete their work. At the same time, the shift from invasive monitoring towards performance measurement provides a better overall experience for employees.
Together, these two roles will help customers create solid, achievable plans for delivering a successful future for hybrid work.
This article appeared in our November 2022 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.