The anywhere, anytime, any device workforce is finally here

In 2013, Yahoo’s then CEO Marissa Mayer controversially sent a company edict declaring her 12,000 staff were banned from working from home. While Yahoo stock price perked up, the tech sector, which had been long driving the hybrid work/footless entrepreneur narrative, shuddered.

Fast forward to post pandemic times, where Yahoo Japan has given its employees the freedom to work from anywhere in the country, super-sized its commuter budget and handed workers the option of being flown in to work if they were needed in the office, on company expenses.

As businesses grapple with accepting the permanence of a hybrid work structure, it’s almost back to the future, in a reverse engineering of what the technology sector has been striving to achieve for over two decades.

“The whole working environment has been turned on its head. We've always talked about being these global organisations and these dispersed organisations, but in the world we live in now that's becoming more of a reality where there's people who work for an organisation full time and never go to the office anymore.”

Welcome to the future state of work, says Switch Connect CEO Rohan Milne, and its actually what technology has always promised for the enterprise.

“What's happening now is nothing new. We've been talking about hybrid work and putting everything in the cloud and having this anywhere, anytime, any device, since voice carrier land 10 years ago. Our pitch was ‘anywhere, anytime, any device.’ All Covid has done, is forced that issue, overnight and instantly, they didn't have a choice anymore. Otherwise, you just went bankrupt or you just shut your doors because you couldn't transact anymore,” claims Milne.

Despite the complete disruption caused by the pandemic, Milne acknowledges that it has served to finally justify the tech promise of providing productivity gains and longer-term capex savings from investing in the infrastructure that supports true work force mobility and consequently a saner work/life balance. “Finally, everyone goes, they're actually right. The productivity boosts are at least 20%-fold.”

“The staff member, working from home is a lot happier. They've walked two minutes from their kitchen with a hot coffee in their hand to start the day and they haven't had to be stuck in traffic driving to work or on public transport, for that hour. It's that work life balance. Everyone wants that flexibility.”

Yet, that flexibility comes at a cost to an organisation and the traditional ways that organisations have run and operated teams and business operations needs to dramatically transform with that shift.

“You have got to be on the forefront, and where technology was always this money pit- well, now IT and technology is becoming a profit centre. It’s looking at the automation and the scalability and the valuable to let the business, operate in the new era that we work in.”

“We are now in the hybrid work age where the traditional ways of doing business just. Don't work anymore,” Milne advises.

He notes that while there are still a lot of businesses that work on the philosophy of ‘we've been doing it for 50 years this way, so we must be doing something right,’ he warns that the only outcome for them is becoming dinosaurs.

Whilst, organisations that are taking the opportunity to move quickly to stay at the forefront of technology and to keep up with how that world's transitioning, they understand what will help them be more competitive.

Hybrid work is also dramatically changing approaches from a management and a business strategy perspective. “It's opening up a whole lot of new diversity for businesses to look at how they do business. And I think it's the younger generation that are really picking this up. So, you've got to change your management structure, you've got to change how you reward and motivate staff and how you really keep that corporate culture,” he adds.

“It's very difficult to micromanage when people are remote. You have to be able to trust your staff that they're going to do what's right and best for the company and empower them to own their role and that's purely down to company culture. Culture's becoming ever more important where I think as businesses, you'll see a tonne more investment in management training over the next 12 months.”