How IT must adapt to the emerging hybrid workplace

In spring 2020, tens of millions of people worldwide were suddenly thrust into remote work as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns came into force. IT and users alike adapted quickly, and companies were able to keep doing business relatively easily given the scope of the change. What’s more, employee productivity actually went up — and stayed that way even after the initial adrenaline surge wore off — across the globe, from Australia to the US.

“Leaders across the board were shocked and amazed how quickly all their workers made the transition once they had the equipment — and by how productive everyone has been,” says Gartner analyst Suzanne Adnams.

Management consultants had been saying for years that a distributed workforce was going to be the new normal, and suddenly it is. Although the pandemic has not ended, the outlines of the post-pandemic workplace are becoming clear. They have major implications for not only workers but IT, which will need to adapt user-supporting processes and play a greater role partnering with HR on the policies and approaches that underpin work processes and a changed culture. IT will also need to reprioritize its technology investments as a result.

In interviews with Computerworld, analysts from Forrester Research, Gartner, and IDC were practically of one mind on the shape of the emerging hybrid workplace, the notions of flexible work, and where IT needs to adapt to best serve the business in the “new normal,” “next normal,” “new reality,” or whatever you want to call it.

The changed context for workforces

Although management consultants have been saying for years that workforces would become more geographically dispersed due to the use of software- and cloud-powered digital tools, the COVID-19 pandemic made that shift happen all at once, says Gartner’s Adnams. “What COVID has done is forced us to leapfrog five to 10 years, or more in some sectors.”

Forrester analyst Andrew Hewitt agrees: “The extended enterprise is the larger trend, … and that requires a robust change-management program” for users, managers, and IT.

The implications for IT are many: extended support desk hours; remote-support and remote-management tools; work-specific user training; cloud enablement of all software possible; appropriate security for distributed work; enabling multiple forms of collaboration and related activities like scheduling, whiteboarding, and availability tracking; provisioning equipment to home-based workers and/or supporting employee-provided equipment; aiding Facilities in modernizing building technologies to avoid touch-heavy surfaces; and partnering more closely with HR for policy enablement and enforcement and for appropriate monitoring.

The major changes are:

Processes go digital

As much as possible, work processes need to be digital and available via the internet because employees are scattered and will remain that way. This means that workers need access to appropriate bandwidth and work environments, that user experience for employees is now critical for business effectiveness, and that employees need to be partners with IT, not just consumers of IT-provided tools.

Workforces are dispersed

The workforce will not all work in the traditional office or company location, nor will they all be remote. Many people will work from home, but many people still need to work in a corporate facility, such as a production line, data center, retail store, shipping center, lab, or even traditional office. And there are employees whose work is location-agnostic but who can’t work at home due to lack of space or insufficient internet access.

Gartner’s Adnams estimates that — although it varies by industry — about half of the workforce in advanced economies will need to work in a corporate facility, 25% to 30% will work permanently at home, and the rest will come to the office two or three days a week and work at home the rest of the time. For white-collar workers, Adnams says to expect about 60% to work at home full time, 10% to 15% to work full-time in an office, and the rest to work two, sometimes three days a week at an office and the remainder of the week at home. Forrester and IDC see similar breakdowns. This mixture is typically called the hybrid workplace.

“There is a ripple effect from this,” Adnams says. “It creates a whole bunch of management challenges no one has had to deal with before. If only part of your workforce is coming into the office, what does that do about your office space? Do you assign a permanent workplace to someone who will be there only two days a week? What is the role of an office anymore? If it’s not the primary workplace of all the organization, then where does that lead?”

Although these issues are management ones, the decisions have implications for IT, which has historically been centered on providing technology infrastructure and tools in dedicated, centralized spaces but now has to make remote work a normal part of the technology environment.

And even in the central spaces that remain, IT will likely have to support the notion of hoteling, where employees reserve a workspace for a day or a few hours. Not only do you need a mechanism for the reservations, you have to make sure that the right equipment is available, from multiple monitors for some users to providing both Mac- and PC-compatible peripherals for others. That may require several configurations of the “hotel” workspaces to be available. IT may also be in charge of monitoring high-touch equipment like mice, keyboards, and headsets to be sure it’s sanitized before and after each use.

Work times change and flex

Much of the workforce will not work traditional hours. What Adnams calls time-blocking and others called time-slicing will become common among digital workers, where they divide the full day from when they awake to when they go to bed into scheduled slices of personal, family, and work times to best juggle all their commitments.

“It’s not the fabled work-life balance. What we have is life integration: one life, one set of hours, one day into which we need to integrate our work activities, our family activities, our social activities, and our personal activities,” Adnams says.

That time-slicing is something high performers have long done, she notes, but it’s now a skill everyone needs — and something that both work policies and technology systems need to support.

Work teams will need to set core hours during which everyone is available, and they will need to set standards around when it’s okay to reach out to someone outside a work time-slice. Management will become less top-down and more team-based.

The change in work hours and the reliance on more employee self-management is typically called work flexibility.

Physical controls reduce virus transmission risk

In corporate facilities, much of the office infrastructure needs to be updated to protect employee health until the coronavirus threat is ended. Things like door handles, light switches, and elevator buttons suddenly become potential virus transmitters and need to be replaced by touchless methods where possible, which may require IT support in some buildings.

Beyond IT, conference rooms and huddle rooms can’t be used as long as the COVID risk remains. “People can’t sit together and breathe on each other,” says Gartner’s Adnams. Changes to air conditioning for better filtering may also be required. And office layouts need to change to enable appropriate social distancing — for instance, by adding plexiglass barriers and taking half or more of cubicles out of service.

Often, the cost of reducing COVID risk at an office is too high, which encourages even more remote work, she says — which then becomes an IT issue.

How IT can support the hybrid workplace

For CIOs and other IT leaders, the emerging hybrid workplace introduces several challenges that require changes at both the strategic and tactical levels. Many of these need to involve Human Resources, because they need to be supported by and align to work policies.

Engage employees as partners, not consumers

All the analysts interviewed encourage a reformed relationship between IT and its corporate users that gives users a stake in the process of selecting, deploying, assessing and improving technology tools, and even outright ownership of some technology areas. After all, the technologies IT delivers are supposed to help them work better, and they know their work needs best.

User experience (UX) for workers — think of it as internal customer experience (CX) — is critical in the new hybrid reality, but IT has been very bad at it for decades. “Users are going to expect the highest level of technology. It’s no longer acceptable to have a degradation of technology” for those who work outside the office, says Forrester’s Hewitt.

UX is not just a feel-good exercise. Employees with high-quality UX are at least 1.5 times more likely than others to have high levels of work effectiveness, productivity, intent to stay, and discretionary effort (meaning to go above and beyond their job requirements), says Gartner analyst Jason Wong. And Gartner surveys show that 77% of employees see that good UX for their tools translates to better customer experience; Wong points out that if employees can do their work more easily and flexibly, customers get better service and support, which leads to more revenue.

To get to a better balance between IT and users, IT has to make several shifts, including ceding some technology to business departments and even individual users, engaging users as stakeholders for the entire technology product cycle, and actively listening to users.

Wong sees several technology portfolios at an enterprise, including:

• central apps and services that IT has historically owned and continues to own, from networking to email
• core business apps and services that the business specifies but that IT manages and largely owns, such as financial and human resources information systems
• departmental business apps that the business owns but that IT helps deliver and guide, such as data analytics and sales tools
• business apps that individuals in the business own in a self-service way, with IT engaged only if policies such as privacy or data validation come into play —for example, robotic process automation tools and low-code or no-code “citizen developer” tools

“Post-pandemic, IT is not agile enough to provide all these applications — not that they were before the pandemic,” Wong says. So IT organizations need to shift to a product model where they enable various technology product lines, some they own, some they co-own, some they support, and some they let be.

Co-owning, Wong says, tends to happen with operational applications for automation and process improvement, as well as for enabling new channels, such as to partners or customers. He recommends the use of “fusion teams” composed of IT and business stakeholders to define, manage, and deliver co-owned apps.

In all cases, IT needs to shift from a project mentality to a product mentality, he says. “IT should be organizing around these business-outcome-driven capabilities; aligning toward product lines; creating services than can be plug and play, sharable, and reusable,” Wong says — all aspects of what he calls the composable enterprise.

Users should be active in any technology deployment, including the technology selection. Lisa Rowan, an IDC analyst, recommends that IT use agile software development methodologies such as having formal user stakeholders, user engagement throughout the process, usability testing, a continual feedback loop, and user acceptance testing — all hallmarks of agile development and a product mindset.

“But they rarely do that before they toss it over the wall,” Rowan says. By contrast, “vendors are good at taking suggestions from user panels. Why should IT be any different?” she asks.

And of course IT has to be actively listening, which is why Rowan suggests that there be an equivalent of a suggestion box or periodic survey that IT uses to get feedback from users beyond the specific projects IT is working on with users.

IDC analyst Laura Becker advises that “users have to be vocal on what their needs are” but concedes that “it’s only useful if IT acts on it.”

Forrester’s Hewitt further suggests that IT survey the users on the experience of using various technologies. In companies that make employees active stakeholders in the technology they use, “IT is being forced to understand the needs of the user a lot more in a qualitative, sentiment-analysis sense,” he says.

For the long term, IT should experiment with more work scenarios to identify flexibility-supporting technology before it is urgently needed — to get ahead of the curve, not just react to it. Doing so is a key part of a future-proofing effort for the IT infrastructure, because the journey to the new reality is just beginning.

Provide comprehensive user support and training

In most organizations, IT is not close to the users, instead providing support only when there is a problem or providing technology to users without much prior engagement. Instead, IT needs to embrace user enablement as part of technology enablement.

“IT needs to decide how much more support to give workers,” says Forrester’s Hewitt, because under remote work, users can’t easily get support from a colleague in the next cubicle or have an IT support technician come and diagnose an issue.

In addition to extended phone support periods to cover the wider working hours in a hybrid office, IT needs to install tools to better see what is happening on computers, whether company-owned or not, for those employees not in an office with an IT support staffer available. Although pricey, co-browsing (a.k.a. collaborative browsing) technology is now emerging that may help support staff and employees have a shared user experience to make remote support more effective, says Gartner’s Wong.

Co-browsing technology goes further than traditional remote-support tools that let a technician see a user’s screen; co-browsing lets the remote support person work in the user’s browser along with the user, as well as add annotations, such as to highlight fields and buttons a user may have missed or to number user interface elements to make step sequences clearer. Co-browsing is already in use for customer-facing applications at several retailers, including Verizon and Burberry, so staff can help customers research and find products and complete a purchase while maintaining social distance or even being in different locations.

And training has usually been limited, pro forma, or nonexistent. Sorry, providing videos from YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, vendors, and the like or links to vendor support pages is not real training. Such resources rarely help employees best use the technology in their actual work.

As small examples, users often don’t know how to turn off notifications at night, check availability of their teammates, use collaboration tools not provided by their company (such as those used by clients or business partners), or set up no-meeting periods for teams using collaboration software. Users need more mastery of the capabilities of their tech. Letting them figure it out on their own or providing links to generic how-to videos won’t cut it.

IT, like HR, rarely understands users’ actual work, which is why it so often relies on cookie-cutter training. Instead, IT could transfer that training budget and ownership to the business departments to do their own training. Better, the business could create training teams composed of power users and IT support staff to jointly develop job-specific training so employees gain more technical knowledge and so IT gains subject matter expertise.

Reshape equipment policies

A decade ago, the BYOD movement brought personal equipment into the formal work processes, and a slew of mobile management technologies followed to support that. Under the hybrid office, computers, networks, and phone services join the party, with workers often using their own equipment for at least some of those.

In the past, remote work was an exception at many companies, so equipment policies were nonexistent or specific to particular departments, Hewitt says. That needs to change. “You need more universal policies on equipment,” says IDC’s Rowan.

Companies could decide to provision all equipment used at workers’ homes, providing or reimbursing authorized computers, routers, phones, and related peripherals like headsets and monitors, perhaps even chairs and desks or tables to ensure safe ergonomic work environments. But even that strategy ends up using shared networks — the internet connection that comes to the home and the network within the home — so there will be some personal equipment in the mix.

Many companies will be more flexible than that, either formally or informally, such as by issuing laptops to employees but letting them use their own (possibly subsidized) peripherals and perhaps their own computers as well. Still, policies will be needed to establish what equipment employees must have to do their work and what employees may add to the mix on their own.

That policy effort also provides an opportunity for the business to rethink its disposal of retired equipment, Rowan says — such as allowing lower-paid employees to purchase such equipment for personal and family use or donating it to schools, charities, and other organizations to help poor people participate in the even more digital world that has emerged after the pandemic.

Regardless of who owns the equipment, the remote worker’s computing environment will be largely provisioned through cloud services and secured by a range of tools and services: access management tools like Microsoft Authenticator or Okta; cloud storage and backup services; unified endpoint management (UEM) tools; remote support tools; antimalware tools; and the like. The potential mix of corporate and personal devices has implications for software licensing and costs that IT needs to ensure it understands.

A related issue is paying for internet access, which some companies do and others do not. You could argue that internet access is a normal personal expense, like electricity or heat, that the employee should pay for. But many lower paid employees forgo broadband internet access at home and instead rely on their cellphones, due to the often high cost of broadband. Or they get the cheapest plans, which don’t support videoconferencing and other work needs well. As a result, “IT needs to consider improving employee infrastructure like internet, even though it is an additional expense,” says IDC’s Becker.

Reshape access schedules for corporate systems

With the need for many employees to time-slice work hours and personal hours as they interleave work with personal and family issues throughout the extended day, IT has to consider how to support that reality.

At the beginning of the BYOD movement, recalls Gartner’s Adnams, “we went through a phase when cell phones became common, with people emailing on the weekend and others feeling they needed to respond.” As a result, some companies restricted access to corporate systems to specific hours with good intentions. “We’re in a different world now, where we need to give employees the control and respect to manage their own time,” she says.

Thus, IT should enable anytime access to corporate systems where they are now unnecessarily restricted by time of day, and provide tech support over a greater portion of the day. Organizations should also monitor access and data flow over that longer day to find possible intrusion patterns under these changed access patterns.

Help HR help users for the long term

The change in the work environment has brought IT and HR closer together, both in strategic and tactical areas. IT can help HR in several ways to help the users they both support.

A high priority should be to help HR head off bad management practices and instead encourage good ones. For example, some managers don’t trust their employees and want to monitor them in unhealthy ways, such as tracking the number of keystrokes or hours they are active. These are “managers who don’t have enough experience and are used to top-down directive forms of management, as opposed to supportive forms of management where they are trying to help get to a desired outcome,” says Forrester’s Hewitt.

While some jobs’ work outcomes can be measured in minutes of activity or actions per hour, many cannot — and companies should not fall into that trap, concurs Gartner’s Adnams. Furthermore, employees have shown they can be trusted, says IDC’s Rowan, which is why productivity gains have remained nearly a year after the pandemic hit.

“Productivity actually increased for companies that took employee satisfaction seriously. Retention increased, and there was reduced absenteeism,” adds IDC’s Becker, stressing the phrase “for companies that took employee satisfaction seriously.”

Rather than enable unhealthy Big Brother tracking, which will only frustrate productive employees and risk driving them away when the economy recovers, Forrester’s Hewitt suggests that IT help HR implement constructive monitoring instead, such as user experience management tools, which try to get better telemetry data on what users are experiencing.

“They collect info on the app, network, and device to try to optimize the experience for the user,” he says. The good news, he says: “We see HR leaders coming to IT teams asking for the data to help inform how they understand the user experience.”

Some of what may be useful to monitor may not be so obvious. For example, Hewitt says, “People are fatigued by 10 hours of day of videoconferencing. For a manager-employee one-on-one, say yes to video. But for a team call with 20 people, it’s less likely the right medium.” Knowing how much time people use various collaboration channels may help identify where one, like videoconferencing, is overused — that data combined with user training could result in a healthier balance of tool usage.

Where burnout is a concern, IT could use activity tracking tools to identify individuals who may be working too much — not too little — to let managers and HR know where there’s a risk. “People are working longer hours and working harder, and that is not sustainable,” Hewitt says.

Fortunately, says Gartner’s Adnams, after the immediate crisis caused by the lockdowns settled down, many employees started to work more rational hours, using techniques like time blocking to avoid burnout. “Most people are pretty self-sufficient and self-monitoring,” adds IDC’s Rowan. So IT needn’t overreact to the fear of burnout, but instead help HR and managers identify those who do struggle with overwork.

Fine-tune your security

Security concerns dominated IT attention in the early days of the work-from-home shift, and rightfully so. Organizations that already supported mobile workers and home-based workers were in a good position during the lockdowns, while others had to catch up to what today should be considered standard security practices.

First, IT should review the security changes made at the beginning of the pandemic to make sure they are still valid and optimal, and to correct errors or weak settings done in the rush as the first COVID lockdowns occurred in spring 2020.

Then, notes Forrester analyst Hewitt, there are some new security issues to address. One is that more data is coming out of the data center than in the past. “I wouldn’t say remote working is less secure fundamentally, but you need to contend with more data to be protected.” So, IT must make sure its security scanners and other tools can handle the increased volume of data flow into and out of its networks.

At the same time, IT should be careful to not over-restrict users, such as by limiting access to corporate systems to artificial working hours or disallowing access to corporate systems from personal equipment, says IDC’s Rowan. “It’s smarter for a data security strategy to allow that because a lot of people will otherwise transfer stuff to their home equipment, which often is not secured” so they can more easily work at their convenience.

Hewitt also suggests that IT look beyond VPNs to secure data traffic, because VPNs weren’t designed for hybrid work scenarios. If the VPN takes all traffic from computers used by employees for both business and personal purposes, all personal traffic has to go through it, not just corporate traffic. That causes a huge increase for the VPN and corporate network to handle. And if the VPN only handles traffic to corporate apps — the typical deployment approach — then there is no protection on personal data connections. (Only one VPN can run at a time, so you can’t have both a corporate VPN and personal VPN in use.)

Those unsecured personal data connections could become malware vectors that infect the user’s computer and then risk the malware getting into the corporate network. This is why IT organizations have long disliked mixing personal and corporate connections on the same devices.

The limitations of VPNs have given rise to zero trust networking and privileged access management tools, which Hewitt advises be explored.

IT should also help people ensure the security of their home routers, such as by educating them on minimal security standards to use, such as WPA2 for wireless encryption and the use of built-in firewalls. Hewitt suggests that, for lower-paid employees, companies consider buying or paying for recent routers whose security settings meet corporate standards when what is in the worker’s home does not.

Phishing attacks have risen during the pandemic, with criminals taking advantage of more isolated, less supported, and more frazzled work-from-home employees. IT should be more aggressive where possible in identifying such attacks, and training (or refreshing) users on how to detect them more easily. If antiphishing tools aren’t in place, they should be.

Continue the shift to cloud computing

The shift away from data center staffing and increased use of cloud services during the pandemic show that IT already knows that the future is in the cloud. Microsoft 365/Office 365 and Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) have gained usage, as have cloud-based collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, and Teams. So has cloud-based security.

With the initial pandemic shock over and the immediate needs addressed, IT should step back a bit and make sure it has a cohesive cloud strategy across the board.

Make mobile enablement the default

It may seem strange that mobile support should be on IT’s agenda for the new reality, but many software tools and web services, whether homegrown or vendor-supplied, still aren’t designed for use on smartphones. They may not support mobile operating systems or smaller screens and touch interfaces, or they may use too much bandwidth for cellular connections.

Organizations that haven’t yet delivered on this strategic need, or have done so only partially, need to finish the job. Mobile is no longer exotic or new, but a core part of how employees and customers alike engage with the digital world.

“IT can help on the deliverables side, making things available through mobile,” advises IDC’s Becker. “Raise the priority. Many people live in homes where Wi-Fi isn’t sufficient,” so they use their phones instead.

And remember: The need for mobile enablement of apps and services is even more critical for customer-facing technology.

The digital transformation that affects us all

There’s a lot of talk in the IT industry about digital transformation, ranging from feel-good vagaries to specific technology deployments. The COVID-19 pandemic’s move to remote work forced a real digital transformation on companies — affecting technology, business processes, customer engagement, and priorities across so many industries globally.

It is a shared digital transformation that won’t stop as the pandemic ultimately recedes. The Herculean efforts made in 2020 aren’t the end of the journey. To do it right, IT needs to think differently about employee involvement, support, and needs, partnering with HR, business management, and the employees themselves. The immediate pandemic response shows that such a transformation is possible. Now we just need to make it a part of our new normal.