The State of Organizations 2023 report by McKinsey reveals that almost 90% of the organizations have, in some form or the other, implemented a hybrid workplace. Around 80% of the employees who have been a part of such a workplace want to retain this working model.

But when it comes to supporting this working culture on the technical front, there are some considerations. For example, the aforementioned McKinsey report also stresses that “it’s important that organizations provide structure and support around the activities best done in person or remotely.” This support needs to be top-notch when it comes to sustaining excellent employee experiences. This is precisely where a good IT helpdesk becomes invaluable.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll walk you through the growing role of the IT helpdesk in expanding the scope of different workplace models for the organization while keeping employees at their best working potential.

 

How Can IT Support Evolve to Enhance Employee Experience in a Hybrid Workplace?

Ensuring that the IT helpdesk evolves accordingly is key to ensuring smooth business functioning. But what does IT Support need to incorporate to accommodate such changes in the organizational environment?

It Needs to Become More Intelligent 

Enabling easier, more agile, and more effective IT services management at scale is one of the most critical parts of updating your IT service desk for the hybrid workplace. How to go about that? In simple words, make it intelligent.

IT support should make use of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data analytics to effectively accommodate hybrid working. These technologies can be used to forecast and stop IT problems, automate rote operations, and give employees tailored advice. For instance, AI-powered chatbots can provide immediate fixes for frequent technical issues, freeing up IT workers to concentrate on more complicated problems. In order to detect patterns and trends, ML algorithms may evaluate past data, enabling preventative maintenance.

Such intelligent IT helpdesk can improve efficiency across the board by:

  • Proactively handling incident and response management function
  • Accommodate real-time and dynamic change management
  • Reduce the overall downtime by keeping tabs on asset lifecycle management

It Needs to Become More Accessible

In a hybrid workplace where workers work from different places, accessibility is crucial. Employees should be able to contact IT support via various channels, including chat, email, phone, and self-service portals.

To accommodate diverse time zones and work patterns, these channels should be accessible around the clock. Additionally, addressing varied needs, including linguistic preferences and cultural nuances, is a part of accessibility.

Besides, the helpdesk must offer resources beyond the typical FAQs and troubleshooting steps. On a practical level, that may mean providing concise, timely information on how to do things. On a more conceptual level, it may mean providing more in-depth coverage on the nitty-gritty of technical issues – perhaps even including step-by-step guides.

Such knowledge exchange can boost staff productivity in a highly digitalized hybrid workplace by eliminating tedious back and forth and establishing a concrete self-service channel.

It Needs to Encompass Both Rudimentary and Extended Technical Support 

IT helpdesk must evolve to support the most straightforward of technical problems (L1 support) to utterly complicated ones (L2 and L3 support). L2 and L3 support, in particular, is incredibly important for a hybrid workplace, as it brings in the remote working factor, increases the threat surface with distributed endpoints, and scales the scope of managing the IT infrastructure and the associated collaboration.

As such, L2 and L3 application support, which encompasses bringing technical expertise to the fore, going granular into resolving technical issues, conducting root cause analysis, designing apt solutions, and implementing procedures to prevent the recurrence of the issues, becomes key to ensuring that:

  • Remote support is provided even for highly technical application issues
  • Cybersecurity best practices are kept intact and adhered to
  • Cloud-related issues are readily addressed and resolved
  • Automation workflows are executed efficiently
  • Workforce collaboration is enhanced with consolidated IT procedures

It Needs to Continuously Evolve & Improve

The environment for IT assistance is dynamic, with new technologies and issues appearing frequently. IT support needs to be flexible and agile to continue being productive. In order for technicians to stay current on best practices and cutting-edge technology, continuous training is required. Additionally, by reviewing support data, adhering to employee feedback loops, and benchmarking against industry norms, continuous IT helpdesk improvement can be accomplished.

That said, customer experience improvement is also a crucial consideration area. User-friendliness should be considered when designing solutions, and complicated technical language and procedures should be simplified.

At the end of the day, IT helpdesk should be able to ensure employee satisfaction by offering a frictionless support experience with quick issue resolution and access to up-to-date digital resources.

 

In a Nutshell

As hybrid working trends continue to proliferate, the IT helpdesk must evolve accordingly to support such changes in the organizational environment. To do so, it needs to become more intelligent, more accessible, and continuously evolve & improve.

The core idea of such evolution should be to enhance employee experience so that there are no hiccups in the way of getting work done. Of course, such evolution should give way to more long-term solutions by enabling employees to access the best technical support.

At Trinus, we ensure that enterprises receive robust IT support for production monitoring, bug fixes, maintenance, and other enhancements. Connect with our experts to learn more.