Office life after COVID-19

Research shows only about 10 per cent of employees want to return to the office full-time, so what does that mean for workplaces?

Office life may never be the same again after the coronavirus pandemic.

We conducted a survey among our employees and partners last week – interestingly, it showed that only about 10 per cent of employees want to return to office full-time after the pandemic ends. A little over 20 per cent want to work remotely full-time. And a whopping 60 per cent opted for a combination of office and remote work.

Naturally, Acronis being a global hi-tech company is ahead of the curve, but I think the trend is quite visible – it does make sense for companies employing large office workforce to be more flexible in their remote work strategy. This massive shift and rather sudden transformation of the traditional workspace into a remote one posed a number of fears, hopes and challenges for both employers and employees. But it’s also obvious, that remote work may not be possible with the current level of technological development at some companies – like production, healthcare, transportation and others.

Traditional on-site companies are concerned about productivity or performance of the employees working outside the office, but the companies that operate partially or completely remotely see many benefits in such a mode. Gitlab, with its famously all-remote team of 1287 people working from 67 countries, say that driven individuals who highly value autonomy and flexibility can experience new levels of joy and productivity when working remotely. For employees, remote workspace means more flexibility in their daily lives, more family time and no stress commuting – which is especially true for large cities.

Implementing a flexible remote work mode provides organisations with several competitive advantages – easier access to a wider talent pool, flexibility in growing and shrinking its workforce, saving on office costs and relocation bonuses. Companies may also benefit from attracting self-motivated employees, sometimes at a lower cost – according to a report by Owl Labs, 35 per cent of employees are ready to take a 5 per centpay cut in order to work remotely.

There was an article “Will Half of People Be Working Remotely By 2020?” published back in 2014, predicting telecommuting to be the future of work. During a survey of business leaders at the Global Leadership Summit in London, 34 per cent stated that more than half of their company’s full-time workforce would be working remotely by 2020. And another 25 per cent said that more than 75 per cent would not work in a traditional office by 2020. Given the recent events in the world causing the remote work revolution, the boldest prediction can come true.

However, the forced emergency in the implementation of the remote work model that the world is experiencing didn’t allow for easy, productive and safe execution for many businesses. According to Acronis’ own global survey, more than 50% of businesses admit they were totally unprepared for the remote work model, unable to overcome these 3 key challenges:

• Communication
• Management
• Technology

Communication is one of the biggest downsides of the remote work model. Challenges arise from shrinking the communication channel and implementation of the safe and reliable tools to facilitate real-time communication. The famous Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 Rule (7 per cent spoken words, 38 per cent voice/tone, 55 per cent body language) of personal communication does not play in favour of remote work. Think of this: when sending an email or a chat message, you’re only getting 7 per cent of your message across. Video conferencing tools heavily rely on image and sound quality – so, it also gets less than 50 per cent across.

On management side, companies are now forced to rethink their approach to evaluating employee performance: relying on attendance is no longer possible, so companies will have to come up with new result measurables. This could be the tectonic shift towards completely data-driven performance assessment.

Technology. In conclusion, apart from psychological adaptation to the new conditions and limited communication, technological changes are of the utmost importance for business continuity. Any business is critically depending on a well-functioning and reliable IT system.

However, the common approach known as “perimeter security” has now become outdated – there’s no more secure “internal network” and non-secure “external network” with everyone working remotely and IT teams having to protect all the new edge workloads. Clearer than ever, people are seeing how vulnerable their data is – and how it must be protected on all levels, on each device. But it’s tougher to protect it, now that employees are free to install any software they like without consulting their management or IT teams. Unsupervised tech upgrades are the main downside of “shadow IT”, and a big security issue.Organisations need to focus on cyber protection of the remote workloads, instead of perimeter security. They need to understand that every mobile device is a perimeter device and has to be treated and protected as such. Now is the time to change the old ways – what companies need is a comprehensive strategy and a universal cyber protection solution for edge workloads, one that guarantees safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity, and security of their data (or “SAPAS”).

Naturally, there is also the macro environment to take into account. For example, Acronis being headquartered in Singapore, a country with the fastest broadband internet connectivity in the world according to Speedtest Global Index, it was easier for our HQ team to work from home comparing to other offices in Europe and US. To counter such conditions in less tech-advanced countries, we invested in home office set ups, so that our frontline employees could continue doing their jobs – you could do the same. For clarity, Australia places 62nd on the list.

Another big area of focus would be training employees to securely use the new technology, to learn of the new security features that address the cyber threats caused by COVID-19 outbreak. For example, in our company we rapidly developed a holistic set of features within our new solution Acronis Cyber Protect to defend remote work devices with extra features, such as: protection of collaboration platforms, like Zoom, Webex, Teams; security alerts related to COVID-19; secure file sync & share and remote data wipe; remote desktop connection; voice-enabled, touch-less controls, and others.

Kevin Reed is CISO at security company Acronis.