How Technology aligns to Gartner’s Nine Future of Work Trends, Post-COVID-19
As organizations and HR departments prepare themselves for the post-COVID-19 environment, it’s important to note that technology will play a vital role in Gartner’s Nine Future of Work Trends.
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The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized how strategic IT has become to all organizations across all industries, making sure the business continued to operate outside of the normal operating model. The following couple of paragraphs talks about how technology is truly tied to business value!
Many organizations had no choice but to provide a quick fix for the remote teleworking and virtual meeting requirements – that is, since there was no time to create a true Business Continuity Plan (BCP), products were chosen at will and integration, where allowed, was forced and not seamless and many times, not secure. As many experts indicate, there will be a second wave of COVID-19 and it’s important for IT to properly plan a secure Teleworker solution based on different personas – not a “one design fits all” model. It’s about maintaining business continuity no matter where you are. It’s about how you communicate internally, with your customers and with your partners. It’s important that you can do this no matter where you are – at a home office, or on the road without a dedicated workspace or just need secure access from your personal device to cloud-based applications, like Microsoft 365 or Salesforce. As part of this BCP, organizations need to have a way to measure the results of their efforts. More and more IT management solutions incorporate advanced analytics that allow organizations to gain a better understanding of the trends they are seeing, the results they have gained and overall, the quality of their employees/customers/partners experience. The better the experience, the higher the productivity!
As more companies embrace the technology to enable the virtual worker, new policies are being put in place, such as staggered workforce days/hours or even the option to work from home 5 days a week. Such policies dictate that not only a proper Business Continuity Plan must be put in place, but these new policies will be an attractive feature to entice new potential employees, while creating loyalty with existing employees. Technology has always been considered an enabler, now more so than ever!