A year into the pandemic, the management consultant at McKinsey and Company went back to their core clients to understand the impact on their businesses who, out of necessity, were operating in highly hybrid working circumstances.
The results were surprising.
According to the firm, about 50 per cent of the companies in its dataset increased performance, while the rest saw no meaningful change or decreases. “The top performers were also more likely to see performance gains across the board and not just for some teams. The most productive even witnessed a 48-percent increase in employees’ job satisfaction.”
What these companies shared in common was a mastery of managing hybrid working – and risk. These companies clarified their strategies and goals, as well as their approach to coaching and recognition. They were also able to absorb and adopt new collaboration tools and technologies, and they enabled their close-knit, cross-siloed team to make decisions.
These are lessons learned far beyond the McKinsey customer set.
According to Gartner CIO Advisory director, Neha Kumar hybrid working should be viewed as an opportunity to radically improve business operations, and employee retention via flexibility.
“Data shows pandemics do reshape society. And this time around, we do see that people have had the time to rethink their priorities. They care about their quality of life, not just the quality of work. The technology crunch so that we're [experiencing] in terms of this acute challenge to find talent and retain talent, this is not going away."
She describes the shift as people taking a deeper and more meaningful look at where people and where work fits in their list of priorities.
In Gartner research on intention to stay in roles, currently 32 per cent of IT employees have an intent to stay, which is lower than the overall non-IT numbers, which is at 40.4 per cent. “When we ask the question, of whether or not flexibility will impact whether they stay at the organisation, 54 per cent of the responders agree that the inclusion of flexibility is a decision factor for them.”
The need for employers to demonstrate flexibility isn't going to go away, Kumar says.
"It’s not about either being completely remote or being completely in the office. [It’s about] showing people how to leverage all different work modes for the kind of work that they're doing, taking a human approach to it so that people are able to make the right choices that work for them."
“This is where we see organisations [in the future] that adopt hybrid well, by investing in those people, managers, by making the policies and principles work for their people … will have the talent that they need.”
In the new age of work, the rule is to go hard AND go home.
Technology leaders have proven that remote work at scale is not only possible, but regarded as the only way to retain the best staff, and recalibrate the workflow dynamic with flexibility and employee best practice at heart.
Yet it is important to recognise that not all companies work the same way and models have to be modified to reflect the unique circumstances of any business.
The shift to remote and hybrid work environments also creates new security challenges and complexities that many organisations have yet to reconcile for the long term.
Technology partners are finding that not only are they driving the network underpinning the hybrid opportunity, as well as being asked to providing the wisdom to guide clients forward safely and successfully.
According to Rohan Milne CEO, Switch Connect the whole working environment has been turned on its head.
“We've always talked about being the global organisations, and these dispersed organisations. But in the world we live in now that's becoming more of a reality. There are people who work for an organisation full time and never go to the office anymore, they’re working from home or they're working remotely [or] they're working overseas.”
“That’s just what the future state will be. When you look to hire staff, everyone wants that flexibility, [but] that flexibility comes at a cost to an organisation.
Tradition ways of working need to transform, he says.
We have gone from bringing your own device to bringing your own workplace, he says.
“It's totally evolved to the point now that people are hiring and they're not issuing corporate laptops anymore, it's your home PC, they're not issuing handsets for the phone system anymore. It's a team's client, or some sort of UCAAS client, it really brings your own technology stack.”
Organisations really need to focus on the implications of an accelerated shift to cloud computing, he says. “We need those services to work 24 by 7. And we need them to work [even when] that transition changes. As a business, you've got to be willing to change your processes. You've got to be at the forefront. Technology was always this money pit that everyone hated in their business because it was a necessity. Well, now, IT and technology are becoming a profit centre.”
Milne says that the vast majority of clients know they have to change, but there are two distinct camps emerging which he calls the’ self-starter boundary pushers’ and the procrastinators.
“We get a lot of clients that ring us and go, ‘What are people doing in this space? What's the rest of the other industry doing. Other clients ring us and say, “We accept the fact that we are so archaic, and that we need to throw everything we got in a skip and start again. That's [everyone] ranging from small to medium businesses, even government agencies that we've spoken to recently.
According to Milne this is where customers are now taking those bigger leaps at a rapid pace, and forgoing older, slower approaches.
“They're now going, ‘Hey, we're just skipping all that. We need the modern workplace, everyone on a laptop or any device, we need to deploy someone quickly, secure a device quickly, track a device, and we need it done yesterday.’
But speed brings risks
“A lot of that is really transforming the cybersecurity space. How do we maintain the same security we had when it was locked in an office and we had a gigantic firewall around it to protect it, to now that data sits everywhere? I think they're really the challenges that businesses are now having to kind of deal with it at a very fast pace.”
Milne believes customers want their partners to share examples of successful approaches which they can then model.
He also says the changes in hybrid work have changed the relationship with vendors.
“There's a lot more vendor engagement now. Previously, we all worked with vendors, but you bought them in when you wanted a discount.” In contrast he says, today vendors are much more proactive about selling the whole technology stack.
“The market is consolidating down to it will be the big players left, picking up that biggest stack. A lot of customers we talked to are trying to take big technology stacks, where they've got like 80 to 90 vendors, and they want to get down to like 20 vendors for 20 different technology platforms, rather than having massive dispersed systems. That's really where we see the big push.”
In particular, he believes it’s the best practices from the big three or four vendors really driving that trend.
Tree change
A byproduct of the pandemic was the great exodus of city workers to regional areas, which served as an early proof point of the efficacy of hybrid and remote working models. Regional technology specialist Advanced Computing has operated in regional Victoria for 23 years. According to managing director Chris Motton, the hybrid model has helped future-proof the business and accelerate adaptability.
“Necessity is the mother of invention, it almost felt like chicken and egg with infrastructure, a lot of times for solutions that we're doing for clients. We’d be developing something or putting together a suite of services or products to solve a business problem. And the initial discussion would be based around ‘Well, we don't have the bandwidth to be able to do that.’
Sometimes that leads them to consider re-engineer the approach for the customer.“
“So if you got something in a paddock in the middle of nowhere, how do you design it so it can work on 3G rather than 5G. So that kind of goes into some of the ways that we develop solutions in the first place, from an infrastructure point of view, or from remote work [perspective].
Customers were remote work was already ingrained made the shift seamlessly to more fulsome hybrid working. Others, not so much.
“Some of those [customers] that had zero remote work capability, they went from zero to 100 in a week. We're now finding that we're circling back to a lot of those customers.” These are the customers who benefit from re-engineering solutions and business processes, he says.
“So that's where we're spending a lot of time at the moment. We're also entering potentially pre-recession type scenarios, [and] businesses are looking at ways that they can cut costs, and it isn't an enabler for that.”
The sense of urgency for IT transformation is compounded by security challenges, particularly when organisations are dispersed, he says on a dispersed scale, which many organisations are relying on tech partners to advise,
“It’s certainly a renewed focus amongst ourselves and our clients. When people started doing remote work, it really just got it, get it working. You know, we put things in place to try and make that as secure as possible. But now it's a case of actually revisiting and going right, what are the scenarios that we need to work through? And how can we help our customers through that?”
He said the recent updates to the Australian Signals Directory’s, Essential Eight, have certainly helped with customer understanding. “And it’s been a way for us to explain that better to customers as well.”
Customers are also looking at their cyber insurance, he said. “The questions are getting more in-depth and [they] need more information, and they're leaning on us for more assistance in that area.”
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