The pandemic years brought about one of the biggest changes in the modern workplace by a long shot. Gone are the old traditions of all corporate jobs being mandated to be carried out from within the four walls of an office in a big city. Today, the onus is on employers to offer a hybrid workplace as a crucial employee privilege. Studies show that 98% of employees in the US wish to work remotely in part for their employment.
In essence, employees get the flexibility to work remotely, while avenues of physical collaboration within the office also exist for part of their time. This is the biggest benefit of a hybrid workplace. But it does come with a set of challenges. The key issue concerning most employers with respect to hybrid working is the ability to enable employees to give their best.
What Is Employee Enablement?
In simple terms, employee enablement refers to the practices that an organization must undertake to equip their employees with the knowledge, resources, and tools to improve their productivity. It is a process that needs to be strategically devised and implemented across the organization to realize the true potential of hybrid work.
The Key Elements of Employee Enablement
Employee enablement is not rocket science. In fact, most enterprises know quite well the core requirement for employee productivity — communication and collaboration efficiency. Building a seamless framework that spurs effective communication and seamless collaboration is the way forward to helping employees put in their best. This is true irrespective of where they choose to work from.
On this note, let us explore how enterprises can strategically evolve a hybrid workplace model to enable employee productivity:
Focus on Outcomes
The first thing that enterprises need to ensure is that they measure the outcomes and not the time employees stay inside the office or online when remote. There needs to be a set standard for productivity requirements aligned with business needs. How the employee achieves it should be left to their convenience with comfortable boundaries.
Achieving a specific set of business outcomes is what matters the most. For hybrid work to be successful, it is critical to let employees decide whether they want to work remotely or through the office. And when they are remote, it should not be a sign of assurance that they will be available day and night.
Ensure Resource Availability
From immediate managers to support groups, knowledge resources, and training or learning assets, employees must be assured of unrelenting support with the resources they need at any point. Enterprises need to build a resilient and reliable support system that provides an interface for employees to gain access to the support they need.
There could be situations where people who need to collaborate may be in different places. This is why the support framework needs to be built to accommodate hybrid work provisions. It should always ensure the availability of support resources from everywhere when an employee needs them.
Offer Tools and Platforms
We have seen the importance of ensuring resource availability for employees to be productive in their work schedules. In most cases, they need to be able to seek help from people instantly.
However, they may need to refer to instructions or guides in some other cases. Furthermore, they may even have to run apps or other digital services to help their customers — for example, a KYC app to capture customer data at the initial touchpoint.
The best option is to have a centralized IT portal that lets them avail the needed resources and, thus, supports the self-service model. The platform would allow them to seamlessly carry out their core business tasks with on-demand support every step of the way.
All organizational tools and software could be integrated with the centralized platform to ensure seamless interoperability. The enterprise must ensure that these tools and software are available 24/7 and can be accessed from anywhere.
Enhance Security
Having digital tools and services to help employees is one side of the equation. In most cases, these may handle sensitive customer data or credentials. Additionally, there would be a cascading level of access requests to enterprise data coming in from employees at all levels.
While approving access requests faster is important, it is even more critical to ensure that secure practices are used for every operation.
Remote employees may be more susceptible to threats in cyberspace as they are away from corporate firewalls.
Hence, it is imperative to equip them with the right security tools, knowledge about threats, and awareness about remedies in the event of an incident.
How Managed Services Can Facilitate Employee Enablement & Drive Performance
A hybrid work culture will see enterprises re-imagining their age-old concepts surrounding the workplace. While it remains the best option for several companies to keep employees happy and engaged, there should be ample care to have hybrid work managed comfortably and safely. It is important to enable employees to work at their most productive levels when in hybrid work mode.
We have seen how the strategic implementation of a supportive ecosystem for hybrid work needs the backing of an efficient IT backbone. However, it may not be possible for enterprises to keep their internal IT infrastructure running efficiently with dedicated staff and resources. This is why having a technology partner to manage your business IT resources is a great choice.
Such a partnership will ensure that your underlying IT infrastructure jumps in to support employees at all times. It can eliminate the friction that your business may have with its digital ecosystem and allow employees to realize the benefits of hybrid work fully.
Get in touch with us to explore why our range of Managed IT services can become your biggest competitive advantage.