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Managing the Changing Hybrid Workforce

Shashi Kiran
Aryaka Networks

The pandemic saw lockdowns, quarantines, self-imposed isolation, restructuring business for online platforms, and remote workers. In short, enterprises the world over participated in the biggest remote work experiment in human history.

Now, more than a year since its start, we are in a relatively better position to gauge the impact of remote working on how we communicate, connect, and create. Large Tech companies have provided tremendous flexibility for their employees. However, this is not possible for all types of businesses and as several CEOs have made a call to bring their employees back into the office, the transition may not be as easy on the technology or human side.

One thing is certain: The hybrid workplace, a term we helped define in early 2020, with its human-centric work design, is the future.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of knowledge workers will be working remotely. Of those, 80% will be hybrid, splitting their time between home and an office, while 20% will be totally remote. For this article, we'll define onsite workers as those who work either in an enterprise branch or HQ, and for the sake of argument, remote workers are those working only from home and hybrid workers are those splitting time between a branch/HQ and home.

To remain competitive, enterprises must embrace every type of hybrid work style whether it's planning for a co-located or distributed workforce. And it doesn't matter which country or continent your enterprise calls home or specific roles within the organization; there's not running away from this trend. According to Capgemini, even when the pandemic subsides, around 45% or employees think they will spend three days or more per week working remotely. What's interesting is that Capgemini also found that 63% of the organizations they surveyed observed an increase in their productivity levels during the Q3 2020 reporting period, versus 16% who said they saw no change and 20% who believed they saw a decrease.

From an enterprise perspective, 88% agree that they have realized real-estate cost savings with remote working in the last three to four months, and 92% expect savings in the next two to three years. One positive outcome of this is potential reallocation of investment that shifts from facilities to better equipping the hybrid worker with an "enterprise-class" experience.

However, this new hybrid work flexibility does not come without its costs. According to Microsoft, which looked at year-over-year growth, weekly meeting times for MS Teams users increased 148%, between February 2020 and February 2021 they saw a 40 billion increase in the number of emails, weekly per person team chats is up 45% (and climbing), and people working on Office Docs increased by 66%. This speaks to the need to further optimize remote interactions to avoid burnout.


And this type of work activity is bandwidth intensive and poses challenges to enterprise remote workers. According to Aryaka Networks' 2021 State of the WAN report, enterprises ranked the biggest barriers to effective collaboration as follows:

■ Set up and management of underlying network infrastructure (42%)

■ Lag/Delay in communication (42%)

■ Poor voice or video quality (40%)

■ Frequently dropped calls (38%)

■ Only 13 percent of respondents said everything is perfect.

The State of the WAN report also identified the top existing WAN infrastructure challenges with the top ones being:

■ Complexity (37%)

■ Slow access (33%)

■ Slow performance (32%)

■ Deployment times (29%)

■ Security (28%)

■ Poor voice or video quality (23%)

■ High cost (20%)

■ Lack of visibility (20%)

Taking a Cloud-First Approach for Hybrid Workforce Simplicity

For enterprises to effectively manage the new realities of the hybrid workforce, they can either do it themselves through various hardware and software solutions, or they can take a managed service provider route. The do-it-yourself approach while maintaining application performance offer some levels of autonomy, it is arguably more complex, especially when you're talking about securely connecting people/branches on a global scale.

A managed approach, on the other hand, offers an "as-a-Service" consumption model that features more agility, lower TCO, fewer SLA headaches, and high application performance. Just be mindful of how the service provider integrates/stitches together all the key components, their effective global reach, and that they don't try to lock you in with their services contracts. Also, it helps to look for one-stop-shop service providers that offer their own technology.

If you've still not started planning for the future of your hybrid workforce, you might want to start now. When shopping for an enterprise WAN solution, make sure it is one that is flexible, with the ability to adjust bandwidth across sites as needed, support potential surges of remote/hybrid workers, and enables the rapid deployment of cloud-based or other SaaS-based solutions. Investing in a WAN solution that's geared for the hybrid workforce gives enterprises a safety blanket to weather whatever life throws your way.

Shashi Kiran is CMO at Aryaka Networks

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Managing the Changing Hybrid Workforce

Shashi Kiran
Aryaka Networks

The pandemic saw lockdowns, quarantines, self-imposed isolation, restructuring business for online platforms, and remote workers. In short, enterprises the world over participated in the biggest remote work experiment in human history.

Now, more than a year since its start, we are in a relatively better position to gauge the impact of remote working on how we communicate, connect, and create. Large Tech companies have provided tremendous flexibility for their employees. However, this is not possible for all types of businesses and as several CEOs have made a call to bring their employees back into the office, the transition may not be as easy on the technology or human side.

One thing is certain: The hybrid workplace, a term we helped define in early 2020, with its human-centric work design, is the future.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 50% of knowledge workers will be working remotely. Of those, 80% will be hybrid, splitting their time between home and an office, while 20% will be totally remote. For this article, we'll define onsite workers as those who work either in an enterprise branch or HQ, and for the sake of argument, remote workers are those working only from home and hybrid workers are those splitting time between a branch/HQ and home.

To remain competitive, enterprises must embrace every type of hybrid work style whether it's planning for a co-located or distributed workforce. And it doesn't matter which country or continent your enterprise calls home or specific roles within the organization; there's not running away from this trend. According to Capgemini, even when the pandemic subsides, around 45% or employees think they will spend three days or more per week working remotely. What's interesting is that Capgemini also found that 63% of the organizations they surveyed observed an increase in their productivity levels during the Q3 2020 reporting period, versus 16% who said they saw no change and 20% who believed they saw a decrease.

From an enterprise perspective, 88% agree that they have realized real-estate cost savings with remote working in the last three to four months, and 92% expect savings in the next two to three years. One positive outcome of this is potential reallocation of investment that shifts from facilities to better equipping the hybrid worker with an "enterprise-class" experience.

However, this new hybrid work flexibility does not come without its costs. According to Microsoft, which looked at year-over-year growth, weekly meeting times for MS Teams users increased 148%, between February 2020 and February 2021 they saw a 40 billion increase in the number of emails, weekly per person team chats is up 45% (and climbing), and people working on Office Docs increased by 66%. This speaks to the need to further optimize remote interactions to avoid burnout.


And this type of work activity is bandwidth intensive and poses challenges to enterprise remote workers. According to Aryaka Networks' 2021 State of the WAN report, enterprises ranked the biggest barriers to effective collaboration as follows:

■ Set up and management of underlying network infrastructure (42%)

■ Lag/Delay in communication (42%)

■ Poor voice or video quality (40%)

■ Frequently dropped calls (38%)

■ Only 13 percent of respondents said everything is perfect.

The State of the WAN report also identified the top existing WAN infrastructure challenges with the top ones being:

■ Complexity (37%)

■ Slow access (33%)

■ Slow performance (32%)

■ Deployment times (29%)

■ Security (28%)

■ Poor voice or video quality (23%)

■ High cost (20%)

■ Lack of visibility (20%)

Taking a Cloud-First Approach for Hybrid Workforce Simplicity

For enterprises to effectively manage the new realities of the hybrid workforce, they can either do it themselves through various hardware and software solutions, or they can take a managed service provider route. The do-it-yourself approach while maintaining application performance offer some levels of autonomy, it is arguably more complex, especially when you're talking about securely connecting people/branches on a global scale.

A managed approach, on the other hand, offers an "as-a-Service" consumption model that features more agility, lower TCO, fewer SLA headaches, and high application performance. Just be mindful of how the service provider integrates/stitches together all the key components, their effective global reach, and that they don't try to lock you in with their services contracts. Also, it helps to look for one-stop-shop service providers that offer their own technology.

If you've still not started planning for the future of your hybrid workforce, you might want to start now. When shopping for an enterprise WAN solution, make sure it is one that is flexible, with the ability to adjust bandwidth across sites as needed, support potential surges of remote/hybrid workers, and enables the rapid deployment of cloud-based or other SaaS-based solutions. Investing in a WAN solution that's geared for the hybrid workforce gives enterprises a safety blanket to weather whatever life throws your way.

Shashi Kiran is CMO at Aryaka Networks

The Latest

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

Image
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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...