Earlier this year, business continuity became a top concern as companies around the world put work-from-home plans in place. Now, companies must optimize their operations to better support this environment. Going forward, many are anticipating that increased workplace flexibility will be the new normal.
How do we prepare for this new normal, and what does it mean for the future of employee experience and our IT environments?
On Friday, May 8, VMware COO Sanjay Poonen will join Infosys on a webinar called “Preparing for the New World of Work.” Here are all the details:
• “Preparing for the New World of Work,” Presented by Infosys
• Hosted by Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys. Other panelists are Todd Inlander, CIO Southern California Edison; Shankar Arumugavelu, Global CIO, Verizon; and Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS.
• Friday, May 8, 2020
• 8:00 am PDT | 11:00 am EDT | 4:00 pm BST | 8:30 pm IST
• Length: 60 minutes
• More details and registration here. Register with the code WARE6.
What does the new world of work mean?
We’ve all been working hard on business continuity for two months or longer, and we can be grateful for and proud of the work that so many IT professionals have put in on the front line.
Now is the time to address the next level of potential issues created by a rapid move to work from home. As Pat Gelsinger said in his recent message, it’s clear that adapting to recent changes is a marathon and not a sprint.
In end user computing, we can see many examples of the tasks that lie ahead. Organizations that used DR and maintenance capacity to host extra VDI users might have to look at expanding their capacity. If VPN performance is still a challenge, it could be time to look at a longer-term software-defined edge networking strategy. While BYO laptops were an essential means for enabling work from home, it’s time to update BYO policies if they were just written to cover phones and tablets. And if corporate laptops need to be on the network to get all of their apps and updates, it’s a good time to look at cloud-based modern management.
After all this optimization work happens, work-from-home will become the new normal. Then, instead of thinking about the difference between remote and office-based employees, everyone will simply be part of a distributed workforce.
Of course, just because work from home is the new normal doesn’t mean that everyone will do it all the time. Some employees will want to be back in the office 100% of the time, and others will be back just some of the time. The point is that there will be a much greater degree of flexibility.
The interesting thing is that lots of people are already thinking about the ways that workplace flexibility will make businesses stronger and employee experience better.
We understand that many employees are still in challenging circumstances, but many are coming to find benefits of work from home that they’ll want to keep taking advantage of as things get back to normal—top on the list is time saved without having to commute. A distributed workforce also means that companies can hire the best talent from anywhere in the world, not just places where they set up physical offices. And similarly, employees can more easily do things like move to be closer to family or another desired location without having the additional stress of changing jobs.
To support all these anticipated effects of remote work and the new normal, organizations are going to have to do even more to make it work. Aside from technology, they’ll have to think about their employee’s physical and cultural experience.
For example, back in March, we saw a lot of blog posts from experienced home-based workers about the importance of setting up a comfortable workspace. Now that it’s May, many people are probably feeling the need for a proper office chair and tall monitor stand. Even when employees aren’t in a corporate office, companies had to be mindful of their physical experience. And changing the cultural employee experience of work from home is an ongoing task. Most of us are now comfortable with video and chat apps, but we must be aware of how communication is different when coworkers aren’t in the same space. A complete digital workspace platform is essential for tying this all together, along with a platform for app modernization, multi-cloud support, intrinsic security, and virtual networking.
This new world of work brings many challenges, but also many opportunities. Please join us on Friday, May 8, as Sanjay Poonen discusses all this and more with Infosys.
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