A year on from when organisations were thrown headlong, almost overnight, and whether they liked it or not, into a largely alien world of remote working for most staff, many are now realising that, not only is there no way back, but that it’s not even desirable to do so. Many of the old working practices, well established and normal only 12 months ago, now look faintly ridiculous and unfit for purpose in the pandemic-adapted world of modern business. The future of work would appear to have already arrived.
As part of a Raconteur supplement, “The Future CIO”, included with The Sunday Times in the UK on March 28th 2021, VMware revealed the full scope of these cultural and technological changes in its published research from October last year, “The New Remote Work Era – Trends in the Distributed Workforce”. Not only is remote working no longer seen as just a ‘nice-to-have’ by employees, but as a result of its wider adoption, businesses are seeing higher levels of innovation, coming from more parts of the organisation than before.
Reacting to the research, Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, director of the Future of Work programme at Oxford University, says that to fully embrace the anywhere business model, organisations need to move away from a management style that relies on monitoring employee inputs to one where they focus on outputs instead.
In “The Future CIO” supplement, Spencer Pitts (VMware’s chief technologist for digital workspace in EMEA), outlines the challenges involved in transforming distributed working from what was initially an emergency pandemic response into something more strategic and foundational for the future. In a Q&A session with Kyle Davis (Integrated Technology Practice Lead at CDW, a leading IT solution provider), Spencer goes on to discuss how, in the emerging world of distributed working, it’s critical to put people first, and doubly so whilst the pandemic still rages.
The Raconteur/Sunday Times “Future CIO” supplement raises some fascinating and timely questions in many current and pressing areas, but the data given from “The New Remote Work Era – Trends in the Distributed Workforce” research from VMware is well worth a read on its own.
To read the full article in the Raconteur Future CIO Report click here.
