Hybrid work model is here to stay: how to maintain employee collaboration and productivity?

According to the latest research, the hybrid work model is here to stay.

Our working habits are one of many domains that went through a disruptive process during the pandemic. Social distancing forced organizations worldwide to ask their employees to work from home (WFH) or even “anywhere” (WFA) away from the office.  The borders between work and private time became blurred in the last year and a half, and it seems that there is no way to “turn back the clock” to the world as we knew it before.

Although the vaccination process is gradually taking effect worldwide, surveys show that employees in many areas of the world no longer see organizational offices as their primary working location. For the most part, employee expectations changed during the last year, and organizations need to redefine their attitude towards the flexible/hybrid mode of working as another way to retain their workers and keep them satisfied.

Moreover, these trends bring about another significant challenge common among most organizations nowadays: How do they succeed in maintaining employee hybrid work productivity and collaboration?

How to implement a hybrid work model

Answering this challenge requires multidisciplinary cooperation inside companies and organizations. From an IT perspective, the challenge is the same: How to ensure that mission-critical applications are available to employees from wherever they work and whenever they wish to work, with the assurance that their digital experience is identical and optimized across all platforms and places?

The first step toward guaranteeing mission-critical application availability and digital experience quality for employees is being able to see what is going on in the network – “to shed light on the network.”

In relation to the hybrid working mode, this power of visualization enables IT managers to classify traffic and identify threats. In addition, gaining network intelligence capabilities will allow the implementation of policy controls, which can be “tailored” to the business network security needs and optimized for performance.

WFH dramatically increased the mix between private and business traffic, and the importance of controlling and prioritizing this traffic has never been more critical.  These control capabilities include updating bandwidth priorities to control what should be permitted (e.g., collaboration applications, Office 365) or blocked (e.g., recreational traffic, file transfer, and other time-consuming applications).

Working with a proven solution that tightly combines visibility, control, and security capabilities enables organizations to quickly adapt to the dynamic changes in working habits to assure business productivity and resilience.