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companies continue to embrace hybrid working and fully remote employees to
drive productivity and improve work-life balance.
Gartner forecasts
that 51% of U.S. knowledge workers (39% globally) will work in hybrid mode
by the end of 2023, and 20% will be fully remote.
In another study, 65% of managers believe their employees are very productive in a hybrid
work arrangement, and 67% of survey respondents would be willing to take a
pay cut to continue hybrid working.
CIOs partnering with CHROs can enable remote and hybrid working options as a
strategic differentiator for their businesses and a benefit that helps hire
and retain
We can review last decade’s shift from web to mobile to mobile devices and
application user interfaces for key lessons on the intersection between what
people experience outside of the office and their expectations as employees.
As people used mobile phones and more apps in their daily lives, employees
demanded the consumerization of IT. CIOs responded with
technology capabilities, and HR sponsored the transformation to an empowered
mobile workforce. Businesses that provided flexible policies and adaptable
technologies were able to deliver new business capabilities, improve
customer support, and improve life for field-working employees.
But there’s one major difference with
over the last couple of years. CIOs and IT deployed remote work solutions in
their pandemic response and were forced to cobble together technologies,
policies, IT support models, and security configurations. The heroics
enabled IT to drive a dramatic shift to remote working, but the solutions
left in place may not be adequate for organizations that seek hybrid working
options as business, productivity, and culture enablers.
The benefits of 5G and business-sponsored remote work technology
Here’s my key question for CIOs and CHROs: Are you offering employees a
company-provided, business-grade wireless internet connection, or are you
leaving it to the employees to continue using their home networks and router
configurations? Many organizations opted for the latter during the pandemic
but switching to business-sponsored offers several benefits to organizations
looking to improve hybrid work experiences, collaboration, a
Through this lens, here are five reasons to prioritize upgrades to remote
1. Address poor employee experiences, especially for employees living in
remote areas
Two questions illustrate how upgrades can improve employee experiences.
First, How many times is a virtual meeting interrupted because participants
experience network latencies? When meetings have frequent interruptions
because of latency issues, it’s hard to get employees to embrace remote
collaboration as a fundamental way of working.
Second, what percent of the workforce lives in remote areas or pays for
low-bandwidth and unreliable connections? Organizations that want to offer
remote access to replace call centers, extend inside sales teams, or provide
equitable employee benefits should consider these factors that a
business-sponsored connection can address.
2. Reduce the long IT resolution times when resolving home networking issues
How many IT service tickets are tied to remote access networking issues, and
what are their resolution times?
These tickets aren’t easy to resolve when employees use different network
providers, routers, and configurations,
IT service desk employee to gather these technical details on issues they
have little visibility or control over. Streamlining to a standard
configuration
reduce the number of these tickets, their complexities, and the time to
resolve remote access network issues. Furthermore, the remote access
provider can take on this first level of support, leaving the internal IT
service management team to focus on more business-critical tickets.
3. Standardize security controls and lower risks
Infosec probably sent instructions to employees on securing their routers,
but they have little time and limited tools to ensure compliance. Security
threats and vulnerabilities emerge continuously, and enabling employees to
connect to corporate networks through personally-owned devices on a shared
home network is risky.
CIOs offering a remotely managed router with a standardized security
configuration reduce these risks and simplify security incident
management.
4. Simplify reimbursing employees, especially in areas where required
Many U.S. states, including California, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, have
expenses employers must reimburse, including costs for remote access. When
employees have different network providers and service plans, managing
expense reporting and payment is an administrative headache.
The legal exposure and productivity loss in reimbursing employees can help
offset some of the costs to companies that provide business-sponsored remote
access.
5. Create an employee benefit that IT and HR can promote
This last reason may be the most important to update remote access.
At a time when it’s hard to hire and retain employees, offering
and hybrid working opportunities is seen as a significant employee benefit.
It tells employees that the company values work-life balance and is
forward-thinking in providing advanced and reliable technology.
For enterprises and businesses that want remote and hybrid working options
for the long term, standardizing remote
many employee and business benefits.
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The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do
not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Verizon.
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