July 30, 2024
Work Anywhere: Charting the Future of Remote and Hybrid Workplaces
Organizations must build from their existing solutions and make strategic new investments to deliver a seamless and secure experience for employees.
The events of the past five years have accelerated organizations’ digital transformation initiatives, whether they were ready or not. Today, practically all organizations are supporting some significant level of remote or hybrid work, and these models continue to evolve, making it critical for business and IT leaders to constantly re-evaluate the needs of their workforce. An effective work anywhere environment requires not only collaboration suites and mobile apps but also a solid IT foundation that includes robust investments in networking, cloud, devices, endpoint management, identity management and cybersecurity. Automation can help simplify this shift. In particular, help desks and contact centers powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce the IT management burden associated with maintaining so many new complex systems. Services from a trusted partner such as CDW can help ensure that work anywhere environments are cohesive and optimized to help organizations achieve their business goals. By architecting IT ecosystems, managing endpoints and enabling secure user access, a partner can simplify the user experience and future-proof work anywhere environments.
See how CDW can help enable your organization to work from anywhere.
The events of the past five years have accelerated organizations’ digital transformation initiatives, whether they were ready or not. Today, practically all organizations are supporting some significant level of remote or hybrid work, and these models continue to evolve, making it critical for business and IT leaders to constantly re-evaluate the needs of their workforce. An effective work anywhere environment requires not only collaboration suites and mobile apps but also a solid IT foundation that includes robust investments in networking, cloud, devices, endpoint management, identity management and cybersecurity. Automation can help simplify this shift. In particular, help desks and contact centers powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can reduce the IT management burden associated with maintaining so many new complex systems. Services from a trusted partner such as CDW can help ensure that work anywhere environments are cohesive and optimized to help organizations achieve their business goals. By architecting IT ecosystems, managing endpoints and enabling secure user access, a partner can simplify the user experience and future-proof work anywhere environments.
See how CDW can help enable your
organization to work from anywhere.
Several years after workers were sent home in droves, organizations are still fine-tuning their workplace strategies.
Some companies have returned to a completely in-person model, requiring all of their employees to be at the physical office five days per week. Others have taken the opposite approach, shedding office space and reducing their overhead by maintaining an entirely remote model. But much more commonly, organizations have embraced flexible workplace policies that enable a hybrid work model, with employees coming into the office between one to three days a week. In these hybrid workplaces, employees sometimes only come into the office when their presence is needed for a specific meeting or task.
According to the Pew Research Center, 41% of people whose jobs can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule, and 63% of these workers say their employers require them to work in person a certain number of days each week or month. The majority of hybrid workers (59%) spend three or more days working from home in a typical week. Hybrid work is more than just a compromise in a tug-of-war in which managers often want their employees to come into the office, and workers prefer to stay home. Rather, the model provides employees with the chance to interact, exchange ideas and collaborate in the office, while also offering large stretches of distraction-free time during which they can tackle their most challenging and rewarding projects.
Still, many organizations struggle to provide an excellent hybrid work experience to their employees. One major challenge is supporting the “democratization” of the work experience, with in-person and remote workers too often having vastly different experiences during hybrid meetings and collaboration sessions.
64%
The portion of hybrid employees who say a hybrid model helps them make more efficient use of their work time
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
Technology tools can help to unify the remote and in-person experiences into one cohesive hybrid workplace, but this requires business and IT leaders to be intentional and deliberate about their work anywhere environments. Most companies adopted remote work technologies in a rush, and many organizations continue to maintain disconnected ecosystems with multiple disparate platforms.
It is clear that hybrid work is here to stay, meaning that digital work solutions are now a critical component of workforce success. It is worth investing the time, effort and money to make sure that these tools lead to a consistent, intuitive experience that helps employees be better at their jobs — no matter where they’re working.
Several years after workers were sent home in droves, organizations are still fine-tuning their workplace strategies.
Some companies have returned to a completely in-person model, requiring all of their employees to be at the physical office five days per week. Others have taken the opposite approach, shedding office space and reducing their overhead by maintaining an entirely remote model. But much more commonly, organizations have embraced flexible workplace policies that enable a hybrid work model, with employees coming into the office between one to three days a week. In these hybrid workplaces, employees sometimes only come into the office when their presence is needed for a specific meeting or task.
According to the Pew Research Center, 41% of people whose jobs can be done remotely are working a hybrid schedule, and 63% of these workers say their employer requires them to work in person a certain number of days each week or month. The majority of hybrid workers (59%) spend three or more days working from home in a typical week. Hybrid work is more than just a compromise in a tug-of-war in which managers often want their employees to come into the office, and workers prefer to stay home. Rather, the model provides employees with the chance to interact, exchange ideas and collaborate in the office, while also offering large stretches of distraction-free time during which they can tackle their most challenging and rewarding projects.
Still, many organizations struggle to provide an excellent hybrid work experience to their employees. One major challenge is supporting the “democratization” of the work experience, with in-person and remote workers too often having vastly different experiences during hybrid meetings and collaboration sessions.
Technology tools can help to unify the remote and in-person experiences into one cohesive hybrid workplace, but this requires business and IT leaders to be intentional and deliberate about their work anywhere environments. Most companies adopted remote work technologies in a rush, and many organizations continue to maintain disconnected ecosystems with multiple disparate platforms.
It is clear that hybrid work is here to stay, meaning that digital work solutions are now a critical component of workforce success. It is worth investing the time, effort and money to make sure that these tools lead to a consistent, intuitive experience that helps employees be better at their jobs — no matter where they’re working.
64%
The portion of hybrid employees who say a hybrid model helps them make more efficient use of their work time
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
The State of Work Anywhere
60%
The portion of remote-capable employees who prefer a hybrid work style, far more than those who prefer an exclusively remote (33%) or fully in-person (7%) model
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
26%
The share of exclusively remote workers who say they feel connected to their organization’s mission or purpose, the least of any employee group
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
29%
The share of hybrid workers who say they would be “extremely likely” to look for a new job if their employer decided to eliminate remote and hybrid work options
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
The State of Work Anywhere
60%
The portion of remote-capable employees who prefer a hybrid work style, far more than those who prefer an exclusively remote (33%) or fully in-person (7%) model
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
26%
The share of exclusively remote workers who say they feel connected to their organization’s mission or purpose, the least of any employee group
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
39%
The portion of employees working in-office three days a week who say they are engaged with their jobs, a higher number than employees who come into the office for fewer or more days each week
Source: gallup.com, “Indicators: Hybrid Work,” July 25, 2024
- EFFECTIVE WORK ANYWHERE
- AUTOMATION ENABLES WORK
- CDW SERVICES FOR WORK ANYWHERE
Frequently, the conversation about remote and hybrid work focuses almost exclusively on collaboration tools. But organizations will struggle to effectively implement these solutions if they lack the foundational infrastructure and workplace strategies needed to support them. As they seek to optimize their work anywhere environments, IT and business leaders should look closely at supporting technologies, employee devices, cybersecurity solutions and workforce inclusion policies.
NETWORKING: A reliable, robust network is the cornerstone of any work anywhere strategy. Organizations must ensure consistent uptime and superior performance to support seamless collaboration and productivity. This means more than merely providing a high-speed internet connection; strategic investments must be made in scalable networking infrastructure that optimize performance, promote visibility and simplify management. Additionally, organizations must prioritize network redundancy and failover solutions that will allow them to maintain continuous operations in the event of an outage. By providing reliable networking infrastructure, organizations can prevent situations where employees become frustrated with — or even lose trust in — the collaboration workflows that are crucial to supporting hybrid and remote work.
CLOUD ARCHITECTURE: The role of cloud computing has undergone several major shifts over the past decade. Initially, organizations were reluctant to migrate resources to the public cloud due to security concerns. Then, many were swept up by the hype of “cloud first.” Today, business and IT leaders typically opt for a “cloud smart” strategy, migrating workloads when the cloud will result in better performance, lower costs or other benefits. The cloud plays a particularly important role in app modernization efforts, and cloud-native applications can help organizations provide fast and secure access to the resources remote workers need.
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DEVICE LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT: Even before the rise of remote work, many organizations struggled with device lifecycle management processes. Some failed to effectively plan out device refresh cycles, and others sometimes even lost track of devices, especially when employees left the company. Device lifecycle management is even more challenging — and more important — for organizations with a significant portion of employees working in a remote or hybrid model. For IT departments that are already overwhelmed, a trusted third-party partner can provide device lifecycle management services, ensuring that remote and hybrid workers always have the tools they need to be productive.
CYBERSECURITY: The shift to remote and hybrid work underscores another change that has been underway for years: the disappearance of the network perimeter. While cybersecurity professionals could once protect their organizations from attack by hardening the perimeter, these same organizations must now provide access to far-flung employees to support collaboration and productivity. Accordingly, organizations must invest in cybersecurity tools such as multifactor authentication (MFA), endpoint detection and response, and Secure Access Service Edge solutions to ensure that their work anywhere initiatives do not put their systems and data at risk.
WORKFORCE INCLUSION: Growing attention has been paid in recent years to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in workplaces. Work anywhere initiatives can support DEI goals by allowing organizations to hire employees from a wider geographical area, including workers outside of the major metropolitan areas where many companies are headquartered. However, organizations must also ensure that remote and hybrid employees have the tech tools, flexibility and support they need to collaborate productively. Accessibility should also be a priority, with organizations making sure that their digital platforms meet the needs of employees with disabilities.
Gearing Up for Hybrid Collaboration
To enable their employees to productively collaborate from anywhere, organizations must invest in solutions that connect far-flung teams and create an equitable experience for remote workers, road warriors and in-office employees alike.
Collaboration Suites: During the initial shift to remote work, organizations often adopted multiple collaboration platforms. Many are now consolidating on suites that provide employees with a single environment for video, chat, email and file sharing.
Video Cameras: Built-in laptop webcams work fine for one-on-one meetings, but hybrid meetings with multiple participants require more sophisticated video technology. Conference rooms should be outfitted with HD video cameras that have auto-framing, speaker tracking and pan-tilt-zoom capabilities.
Conference Room Technology: Similarly, hybrid meetings will be much more effective if conference rooms have high-quality microphones and speakers, large digital displays and digital whiteboards that give in-person and remote participants the ability to collaborate and co-author in real time.
Project Management Software: By giving their employees access to project management tools, organizations can help teams stay organized around their common goals, regardless of physical location. According to Zoom, 83% of workers say project management tools are key to keeping track of project status.
Almost by definition, remote and hybrid work styles introduce new complexities to office IT environments. Technology professionals must support a wider array of solutions, and just a few seconds of downtime can cause a vital business leader (or even a customer) to literally vanish from an important meeting. Increased automation can help streamline maintenance of work anywhere technologies, ensure consistent uptime and performance, and provide a better experience for both IT professionals and line-of-business employees.
Additionally, automation can simplify security, an incredibly important factor as more employees access corporate networks and data remotely. Automated tools also typically gather and collect vast amounts of data, providing insights that help organizations make informed decisions and fine-tune their work anywhere practices and policies. When implemented effectively, automation helps employees to be more productive and frees up IT staff for more strategic projects that bring added value to the business.
IMPROVED EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE: According to a Forbes article citing a 2022 report from Automation Anywhere, 94% of organizations said that shifting employees to higher-value work in 2023 was one of their strategic priorities. More than two-thirds said that at least 30% of work activities in areas such as customer service, sales, marketing, finance, human resources and IT could potentially be automated. This doesn’t mean that organizations should look to replace employees with automated tools, but rather that they should seek opportunities to use automation to help make these workers more efficient. Automation also typically plays a large role in app modernization initiatives, which can significantly improve the employee experience, especially for people working remotely.
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AI-POWERED HELP DESKS AND CONTACT CENTERS: AI-powered customer contact centers and chatbots have quickly transformed the way businesses help their customers solve problems. These systems can handle an enormous volume of inquiries around the clock, helping customers to get answers and solutions at their convenience without busting corporate budgets. The same concept works for internal IT help desks, especially for routine troubleshooting tasks, password resets and other inquiries that don’t require hands-on assistance. Although AI tools can be powerful, it is important for organizations not to overplay their hands here; when chatbots provide erroneous, confusing or otherwise unhelpful responses, customers and employees will quickly become frustrated.
REDUCED MANAGEMENT BURDEN FOR IT PROS: Over the past several years, many organizations have dramatically scaled up their IT environments to support remote and hybrid work, with an emphasis on collaboration suites, conference room technologies and AI solutions. This means more for IT professionals to manage. Automation can help ease the burden associated with supporting, managing and troubleshooting complex systems. For instance, automation tools can monitor network performance, deploy software updates, and even detect and resolve issues in real time. Often, these automated interventions enable consistent performance without the need for human intervention. By automating routine management tasks, organizations can free up IT staff to focus on developing new technologies and optimizing IT infrastructure.
ENHANCED CYBERSECURITY: Organizations were already struggling to keep up with an ever-growing list of cybersecurity challenges, even before the rise of remote and hybrid work. Now, with large portions of the workforce remotely accessing mission-critical systems and sensitive data, it is more important than ever to quickly identify and mitigate cyberthreats. Much of this work can (and even must) be automated. For instance:
• Managed detection and response offerings provide automated monitoring of alerts
• Automated patch management prevents organizations from falling victim to common cybersecurity gaps
• AI-powered security analysis tools can identify anomalies, including unusual behavior by insiders
• Automated incident response solutions ensure that organizations can rapidly respond to attacks
Many of the crucial elements of work anywhere can become overwhelming, especially for smaller organizations. Most organizations are capable of rolling out solutions that enable remote work and, in fact, have done so over the past few years. Still, it is another thing entirely to manage and optimize these tools in a way that maximizes value and helps an organization make progress toward its business goals. Often, services from a trusted third-party partner such as CDW play a crucial role in the success of work anywhere initiatives.
Ecosystem Delivery: With its decades of experience leading IT initiatives for companies across sectors and a wide array of partnerships with top tech vendors, CDW can help businesses design and implement their entire work anywhere ecosystems. CDW can map out how users work, create a technology roadmap to best support employees, and then deliver and virtualize the applications and desktops that will bring a work anywhere strategy to life. By taking a comprehensive, end-to-end approach to work anywhere, CDW’s solution architects can ensure that all aspects of an organization’s IT environment work together seamlessly, creating a cohesive and efficient ecosystem that improves employee satisfaction and productivity.
Connected Devices: End-user devices and robust connectivity are more important than ever to business operations. When employees work from home or on the road, their laptops, tablets and smartphones essentially become their workspaces, giving them access to the digital tools they need to do their jobs. And with many meetings being conducted in a hybrid fashion, any significant level of network latency can bring business to a halt. CDW’s experts can architect robust, redundant networks that ensure always-on connectivity, while also making vendor-agnostic device recommendations. Organizations looking to future-proof their device fleets may want to consider machines equipped with neural processing units to support AI applications.
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Endpoint Management: Managing employee devices can be a significant challenge, even when everyone is working from the office. Spread those employees — and their devices — out across a wide geographical area, and this hurdle can become almost insurmountable, especially for organizations with relatively small IT teams (who may be working from home themselves). CDW’s Managed Endpoint Anywhere service delivers support to users anywhere, anytime, on any device. In a Quickstart Assessment, CDW’s solution architects evaluate and offer recommendations for end-user experience in several areas, including device, app and data access, networking, security, and support. This more in-depth roadmap workshop includes analysis of the potential return on computing investments using end-user data.
Secure User and Device Access: The physical network perimeter has been blurring for years, and the rise of remote and hybrid work has erased it for good. This means that it is critical for organizations to deploy advanced identity, credential and access management solutions to ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive corporate data and systems. Effective ICAM tools will offer MFA and single sign-on capabilities — a combination that prevents organizations from falling victim to breaches resulting from stolen login credentials, while also offering a streamlined experience for users.
Management: There is no such thing as a set-it-and-forget-it cloud environment. In a CDW Cloud-Managed Services engagement, organizations can offload some or all of their critical cloud management tasks, freeing up internal staffers for strategic projects that drive innovation and business value. CDW’s many years of cross-industry cloud experience allow experts to spot challenges and opportunities that internal staffers may miss, which helps fix problems before they have a negative impact on end users. Additionally, CDW provides continuous monitoring and maintenance, ensuring that cloud environments operate at peak efficiency and reducing the risk of both downtime and unnecessary sprawl.
Cloud Lifecycle Services: Finally, CDW’s Cloud Lifecycle Services provide end-to-end design, management, optimization and retirement of resources and environments. With specialized skills backed by over two decades of experience, CDW’s industry-certified professionals provide unmatched speed and support. CDW is one of very few organizations with relationships and expertise across all three major public cloud vendors, making CDW Cloud Lifecycle Services a natural fit for organizations with large multicloud investments. In these in-depth, long-term engagements, organizations receive help with cloud migrations, talent orchestration, managed services, professional services, managed application services and elastic engineering services. Additionally, CDW’s 24/7 Solutions Center is available to help organizations solve problems in real time, ensuring seamless cloud operations.
