Returning to Office?
Here’s How IT Can Boost Workplace Flexibility

While life seemingly returns to “normal” following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we work likely will not. Accelerated digitalization and a reliance on cloud applications to accommodate remote working have increased productivity and success, facilitated collaboration and the distance economy, and allowed organizations to be more cost-efficient and match the baseline of technological capability in the workplace.

However, as more and more organizations turn to the hybrid work model in the wake of rapid digital transformation, and the continuing uncertainty of COVID-19, workplace flexibility has become a prominent requirement.

In this blog, we delve into tech solutions that can boost workplace flexibility and help your employees with a seamless transition to a hybrid work environment.

Bring Your Own Device

Bring your own device (BYOD) is about allowing employees to use their personal devices for work purposes instead of using company-issued phones, laptops, and so on. This concept enables better efficiency in productivity and cost due to:

1. Convenience
   

   Room booking provides total visibility on the availability of meeting rooms and workspaces to aid both efficiency and de-crowding. It also enables scheduling to be staggered automatically to ensure proper disinfection and sanitation between use.

2.  Accessibility
   

   Personal devices also tend to be more accessible, with mobile phones, tablets, and laptops constantly toted around, and may even be technologically superior to the devices that their companies can provide. Companies benefit in turn by spending less on the procurement and management of such devices.

Making BYOD work for you: BYOD policies allow employers to introduce flexibility in how employees conduct their work, but with this comes device management complexities and security issues. As such, an organization’s decision to adopt such policies should be evaluated case-by-case.

To secure confidential information and materials, enterprise mobility management (EMM) software, such as Microsoft Intune and VMWare Airwatch, offer solutions to remote IT service management. EMM is divided into three categories:

• Mobile device management (MDM)
• Mobile application management (MAM)
• Mobile content management (MCM)

These solutions manage and apply security measures to the entire device, specific apps, and specific content/files, respectively.

IoT Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) has been key in connecting enterprises and workers in recent years, taking remote work to new heights, particularly in the manufacturing, healthcare, asset management, and physical security industries. IoT allows machinery, equipment, or facilities to be monitored and supervised remotely. Production, upkeep, and safety can be managed from any distance at any time, no longer necessitating physical human presence and the constraints that come with it.

Making IoT work for you: In its remote accessibility, IoT sees issues around data management, specifically in the areas of data residency and data minimization. Data residency refers to the storage of data, and data minimization concerns the prevention of an inefficient sprawl of information. It is important to keep in mind compliance with data privacy regulations and have cyber-risk mitigation strategies in place to protect your business, employees, and customers.

Integrated Workplace Management System

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has played a substantial role in the development of integrated workplace management system (IWMS) software platforms. An IWMS helps a company oversee and optimize its physical spaces.

Traditionally used for functions like utility tracking, lease management, and capital project management, the latest IWMS solutions have now evolved to include features that can address post-pandemic concerns such as employee safety, balancing decreased capacity with real estate costs, and more. They can now work with new software-as-a-service productivity tools to transform any workplace into smart offices.

New IWMS features that can help improve productivity, maintain flexibility, and keep your employees safe:

1. Room Booking
   

   Room booking provides total visibility on the availability of meeting rooms and workspaces to aid both efficiency and de-crowding. It also enables scheduling to be staggered automatically to ensure proper disinfection and sanitation between use.

2. AI-driven space planning
   

   AI-driven space planning makes it easy to remap your workspaces onto floor plans in adherence to social distancing guidelines. Additionally, it can also lower costs by continually analyzing trends of how and when workspaces are used to predict how space can be better optimized in the future.

   AI-enabled IWMS can also help foster collaboration. After months of remote-working, employees are welcoming more opportunities for in-person interactions and collaborative workflows. AI can analyze the patterns of your employees and teams, and offer options for in-office team rotations and real-time identification of who is in office.
   
   

Conclusion

Creating a successful hybrid work model is about making the employee work experience in and away from the office as seamless as possible. This means investing in the right mix of technology solutions, one that that can evolve with the specific needs of your business. The next step is for organizations to think about where they stand as they bring workers back into the office, identifying employer and employee needs, and how they can consolidate the two.

Author

Kaylee Wang
Summer Business Analyst

Kaylee is our guest blogger who was recently a summer business analyst at Wavestone, as part of our internship program. She is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Columbia University in the City of New York. Our interns and work-study students benefit from regular monitoring, hands-on experience with operational assignments, and are involved in all of the events that punctuate corporate life within the firm.