A new generation of workforce, innovative new business models and breakthroughs in technology have been steadily co-creating a dynamic new work culture. Businesses are setting aside entrenched presumptions about methodology and shifting their focus to working smarter.
The need to rethink traditional workforce models has been gathering momentum for some time. A landmark two-year Stanford study, released in 2018, showed that employees who worked remotely, added an additional day’s worth of productivity per week, while reducing attrition rates and office-space rental expenses for businesses.
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath digitally empowered remote working arrangements.
Organizations are understandably placing the highest possible priority on securing the health of their workforces, as the reopening of the economy begins to gather steam around the world.
However, astute opinion makers across industries, are also steering the conversation towards proactively embracing the much touted new normal, with a host of innovative measures. It is the perfect confluence of a compelling argument for change and the opportunity to implement it. After all, a more flexible, agile and productive model of operations, as well as a more empowered and engaged workforce, are advantages, which no organization can afford to ignore.
As businesses become increasingly cloud-native, enabling the dynamic workforce of the future will involve reconciling data security, digital collaboration and seamless business continuity, while concurrently enhancing transparency and accountability.
In order to successfully materialize this transition, businesses will need to implement multi-factor authentication to secure VPN access, establish protocols to manage remote workforces, and secure a much higher number of remote endpoints. However, the upswing in productivity, and employee engagement, make such measures more than worth it.
In effect, this dynamic new workforce model enables a radically improved work-life balance for employees, while allowing organizations to implement far leaner and resource efficient operations.
It is this win-win that is responsible for the buzz around rethinking workforce models, especially now that businesses have experienced the viability of the innovations involved, as a result of the on-going crisis.