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May 20, 2020 - by Synoptek
With the COVID-19 crisis proliferated across the globe, businesses are presented with a two-fold challenge: managing their remote workforce while sustaining growth in addition to maintaining status-quo. With the crisis showing no signs of an immediate slowdown, enterprises must take swift measures to build a robust and effectively scale it to meet future demands in an uncertain era.
A strong digital workforce can not only minimize disruption but can also help overcome vulnerabilities in existing business models – while enabling organizations to build a crisis resilient, elastic enterprise ecosystem.
As most countries around the world went under complete lockdown, the global workforce was forced to work from home – to ensure their safety as well as to slow down the spread of the virus. Almost 80% of employees are now working from home; therefore, preparing the workforce for this new digital change is critical to business success.
Building strategies that allow them to access the tools and resources they need, communicate effectively with peers across different locations, time zones, and languages, and seamlessly do their jobs has become an essential business requirement.
Ensuring employee productivity and enabling seamless communication across the geographically dispersed workforce while driving innovation means organizations have to build and scale a digital workforce. This includes designing the right processes, establishing appropriate security controls, and implementing the right tools, so employees can be just as productive working from their homes as they were working from office.
The sudden economic shift from physical to digital has put businesses at risk; many have shut shop while many others are struggling to operate. Business resilience, employee confidence, and customer trust are all in jeopardy.
To strengthen market position, customer relationships, and business processes, executives must take proactive steps now to weather the storm and put their companies in a better position for the new normal. They must prepare for new ways of operating and serving customers – despite all the challenges that have been brought to the forefront.
Setting up a remote workforce and scaling it further at an enterprise-level to ensure business continuity, especially during this time of crisis, is a challenging task. However, with right practices and timely implementation, enterprises can optimize business operations, maintain workforce productivity, sustain enterprise-wide communication, and mitigate security risks.
The COVID-19 crisis has resulted in a highly dispersed workforce, which is using home internet networks and personal devices to carry out business operations. A spread-out workforce needs access to collaboration tools that enable them to communicate with peers through audio or video chat, work together on documents, and share files.
Therefore, one of the most important components of a thriving digital workplace is digital collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams that can help employees save every week through enhanced collaboration while improving time-to-decision by 17%.
The new digital workforce necessitates seamless remote access to systems, tools, and resources. Therefore, moving workloads to the cloud (if not already done) is a great step towards creating a digital workplace. Investments in the cloud can not only help you meet current enterprise needs, they will also make it easy for enterprises to scale resources up and down and cater to uncertain, future needs.
In this time of crisis, where businesses are driving all their focus on sustaining operations, empowering employees, and retaining customers, enterprise security has taken a backseat. Hackers are making the most of this opportunity by engineering attacks at businesses where security policies are weak.In the COVID-19 era, updating cybersecurity policies is just as important as enabling collaboration. Make sure to revisit your security posture, and determine what systems need to be accessed, by whom, and using what device. Implement appropriate endpoint security solutions, tighten access control measures, and strengthen mobile device management processes.
As businesses struggle to normalize operations, investments in technologies like BI can be a strategic move. Through improved data analysis and faster business reporting, BI can help improve operational efficiency while providing the insight businesses need into remote collaboration challenges, gaps in business processes, and analysis for customer churn. Businesses can use these insights as focal points to empower employees, maintain the trust of customers, and strengthen competitive standing.
COVID-19 has completely changed how businesses have been operating. Many businesses have temporarily – in extreme cases permanently – shut down. However, most businesses are using this opportunity to make changes and investments that can have a long-lasting effect on the bottom line – creating a digital workplace.
Empowering the remote workforce and providing them access to the tools needed to carry out day-to-day tasks as well as the capability to communicate with peers working from their homes should be every organization’s priority at this time. With no clarity on when life as we know it will return, creating a digital workplace is the only way to adjust to the new normal.
Interested in investing in digital workplace services? Contact an expert at Synoptek today.
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