Are You Enabling a Resilient Workplace

For most organisations, a remote/hybrid workforce is here to stay

Aberdeen's 2024 Future of the Workplacestudy found that today's IT professionals are challenged to provide a larger number of remote / hybrid users with a faster, personalised level of support, in a more complex and dynamic computing environment with increased cybersecurity- and compliance-related risks.

Pre-pandemic, the business workforce skewed strongly towards mostly or entirely on-site- and post-pandemic, on-site workforce policies have been rebounding. Even so, Aberdeen's benchmark research projects that 4 out of 5 organisations will continue supporting some degree of remote / hybridworkforce for the longer term (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Post-pandemic, on-site workplace policies have been rebounding - but for 4 out of 5 organisations, at least some degree of remote / hybrid workforce is here to stay

Source: Aberdeen, May 2024

As a simplified view of how the workplace has evolved over just the last few years, Figure 2 also incorporates a net workplace index - inspired by the well-known net promotor score (NPS)- in which +100%means that all respondents are entirely or mostly on-site, -100%means that all respondents are entirely or mostly remote, and values of +50% and higheror -50% and lowerare generally considered indicators of a strong trend. In this context, the sharp and sudden shift from +42.7% to -7.9% underscores the unprecedented impact of the global pandemic on the modern workplace. Post-pandemic, this index returned to a "new normal" range of +12.9% to +14.9%. Looking forward, however, the future of the workplace is only slightly skewed towards on-site (+6.7%). Said another way: For most organisations, a remote / hybrid workforce is projected to be here to stay.

Aberdeen's research findings are consistent with empirical tracking of the return-to-office policies of the largest companies, in which 77 of the Fortune 100 continue to support at least some degree of remote / hybrid workforce (Source: https://buildremote.co/companies/return-to-office/#statistics, May 2024).

Pragmatically, this means that the technologies and capabilities initially put into place on an "emergency" basis in H1 2020 need to be revisited with an eye toward a more planful and experience-based approach to supporting a highly productive, highly resilient workforce in the future.

We can see this happening now. Updated strategies and investments in support of a resilient, remote / hybrid workforce are increasingly being featured in management communications about strategy, operations, and financial condition - as in the example of Vodafone's 2024 Annual Report, which notes that "the shift to hybrid working has redefined the role of the office and inspired us to create a new global office design primarily for collaboration and connection."

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