Companies must review their business processes to ensure optimum employee experience as hybrid working becomes the norm, according to Peter Quinlan, VP of Business Collaboration at Tata Communications.
As remote working has proliferated throughout the past year, employees have become comfortable with collaborative tools and technology and many will opt for a hybrid working model when offices re-open. This will open the door for businesses to review their current IT infrastructure.
“I think people haven’t quite figured out how do you change your business processes for the better now that they‘ve got a distributed workforce and collaboration technology and how they might be able to integrate those more easily,” he told UC Today.
“Do you change workflow? Do you change how people run their business and the management systems that people use to manage employees and business processes? [Transitioning staff to remote working] was an immediate reaction and it was about supporting existing processes but I think there’s an opportunity now to think of how to make those processes better, streamline them and make them more efficient, but that hasn’t happened yet.”
The hybrid working model also presents new challenges, such as ensuring employees maintain a good work-life balance and on-boarding new staff members remotely while maintaining the essence of the company culture with a distributed workforce, Quinlan added.
“Everybody working from home had worked for the employer and so had some kind of history, they had a base, they had an office, they might have gone through a face-to-face induction class when they joined the organisation,” he explained.
“New employees were with other people who have been in the company for a long time and they could pick up on all sorts of cues about what’s acceptable in the company – all those subtle things that define a culture of an organisation. Now when you’ve got new employees joining, they’ve never been to the office, so how do you maintain that culture and cohesion?”
Quinlan predicted that the “next wave” of employee experience and collaboration technology will come with the integration of mobility and 5G. He predicted that in the not-too-distant future every device will have a SIM with a single mobile and data plan, covering a user’s personal device, as well as work devices, such as desk phone or laptop.
“That will allow organisations to address what is one of the other big challenges that they face, which is how to maintain security and privacy policy restrictions across a distributed enterprise workforce and a lot of that needs to be rethought,” he elaborated.
“Having a single identity across multiple devices with a common network connection that can be managed, is the next wave, but it will take us a little while to get there.
“But everybody moving to a cloud collaboration model is a key stepping stone in getting there.”
