While there are stories abound on the many subjects relating to pandemic business conditions and the altered course of many working lives, the narrative has subtly changed in recent months.
First, we heard tell of the fast pivot that many organisations made from normal, stable corporate settings to work-from-home environments. In many cases these were positive transitions, as the world looked to react quickly to new challenges, and find underlying stories about continuation and stability in the face of adversity. They were underpinned with caution too of course, with so many unknown quantities at play and the over-riding concern that the world economy would decline and lead to recession.
Accepting that stories often related to provisioning employees for their lockdown, the fast rollout of hardware and applications that would enable them to continue working from the safety of their own homes. One such case involved a large Australian enterprise setting up a drive-through system, so that employees could turn up within a ten-minute window and receive their take-home bundle of laptop, router, headphones and other peripherals in order to set up a home office.
Across Australia and the world, it was literally a case of “we are going to trial a work-from-home model for the next two weeks, here is what you need,” and since then many people and companies have not looked back – shifting business strategies to support remote work for the long term because of the success they’ve seen in the new way of working.
Following the initial outpouring of stories on this change, the narrative swung towards the more fundamental aspects of work-from-home life. Security took centre stage, with pundits viewing vulnerable home networks as inherently risky places to be downloading sensitive information from enterprise cloud services.
Now, as organisations have shifted their mindset to view work-from-home as an ongoing and long-term situation, the narrative changes again.
With as many as 75 percent of employees in Australia and New Zealand likely to negotiate for at least some percentage of their work to be performed from home in their next contract, organisations are looking at the situation as a vast cultural shift, and accepting that the future of work looks significantly different.
As such, the focus now moves towards a Work From Anywhere (WFA) setup, with employees equipped to securely and seamlessly access files, documents, applications, workflows and communications tools from, literally, wherever they decide to work. With modern connectivity, and now the addition of 5G in some areas, it is increasingly possible to take a laptop to the local park or café, set up a working space with neighbourhood friends, or work from the kitchen table.
Whereas the initial Work From Home movement was forced, and most work environments hastily thrown together, they are evidently here to stay in evolved capacities. As the hybrid part-office, part-WFA movement gathers force, it is now incumbent upon organisations to optimise the working environments of their employees no matter where they are and provide proper governance across all aspects of their working life.
Therefore, technologies that bind these modern, WFA workflows together need to be properly governed by the organisation and provide access to all the same applications and content that an employee would usually call upon in an office environment. Content services platforms can be the bridge between the corporate environment and the WFA employee, offering fast, secure access to files and workflows, as well as providing that critical 360-degree view of all available information in a particular task or workflow, and therefore allowing seamless coordination of tasks between employees.
Enterprise Search, another function of an end-to-end content services solution, can empower employees to find a much greater range of information, acting as an umbrella search engine across the external Web, internal assets such as intra-web and staff portals, files and content repositories, social media channels and more. Enterprise Search functionality provides deeper layers of content across all these areas of the organisation, presenting it to employees in real-time regardless of where they are working.
Sharing of files and workflows needs to be as secure as possible, and have multiple layers of protection and encryption built in. Any file-sharing platform is a potential attack vector for cyber criminals, and the more secure the portal, the less risk involved. Many employees will have their own, base-line subscriptions to file-sharing platforms, and will often join one in order to receive specific files from an external source. This is an area that requires strong governance by the enterprise, with everyone – literally – on the same page, using the same application, which is deployed and governed by the organisation.
Not surprisingly, the quick shift to remote work had many organisations reconsidering their software deployment approach. The benefits of cloud-based platforms became even more apparent and in the post-pandemic world the preference will be for cloud-first platforms, to deliver applications on-demand, with security built in at both ends of the transaction. offer flexibility and scalability they offer for the organisation, and seamless delivery for approved users is unmatched.
In essence, new work models should offer employees exactly the same experience no matter where they happen to be – at a park bench, or in a corporate boardroom. The organisation needs to focus on digitisation at the source, with strong governance coming from those few still in a central office environment – but this must be implemented with the needs of the WFA employee at its core. What was once a departmental roll-out of software has now become an enterprise-wide roll-out, and must be actioned with care, diligence, strong governance and flexibility. At the very heart of this optimisation is the need for all employees to be properly equipped to work in this next normal, with all content presented to them exactly as it was prior to the pandemic. Nothing less will enable the organisation to continue to sail at full steam ahead into the newly-created future of work.
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Hyland Category: Software and Business Solutions Profile: Hyland is a leader in providing software solutions for managing content, processes and cases for organisations across the globe. For 25 years, Hyland has enabled more than 15,500 organisations to digitalise their workplaces and fundamentally transform their operations. Named one of Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For® since 2014, Hyland is widely known as both a great company to work for and a great company to do business with. For more information, please visit Hyland.com
