Germany in 2022: Companies introduce working from home and mobile working country-wide. All companies? Not all. A few indomitable executives resist the trend, which they associate with a loss of control and perceived additional costs. And anyway, most companies look back on good decades - with all colleagues in the office, regulated working hours, clear hierarchies, and the same more or less functioning coffee machine. Why change that? After all, we've always done it that way and it's worked well up to now.
To many employees, these or similar words sound familiar. When it comes to the big issue of how we want to work in the future, many management levels veto hybrid working because of their traditional views. The result: a standstill in the relationship development between employers and employees, while the labor market is moving in a completely different direction. To attract and retain young talent, companies are increasingly turning to flexible models that allow employees to avoid the stressful commuting several days per week, and to improve their work-life balance when working from home. If you don't want to lose out to the competition in this area, you need to urgently rethink your approach. Corporate policies that categorically reject new work concepts not only lead to dissatisfied employees and outdated standards, but also miss great opportunities. Because that's exactly what a hybrid workplace infrastructure should be seen as: An opportunity to work together effectively, flexibly, and digitally.
Another fallacy is the assumption that hybrid work can be implemented by providing employees a laptop and allowing them to work from home a few days per week. Here, too, rethinking is urgently needed. To be successful in business with a hybrid work model, employees must be able to perform high-quality work at any time and from any location and have access to all the information they need. The big magic word is business enablement. It means empowering employees with the right hardware and software to work efficiently from anywhere. These technologies need to be tailored to the specific deployment scenarios. But fundamentally, they have some important characteristics in common: they need to be intuitive to use and integrate with existing solutions. In addition, the solutions should be adaptable to the individual needs of the end users and be usable throughout the company.
Enterprise search solutions, among others, are a great help in consistently implementing business enablement. They enable employees to quickly access work-relevant information throughout the company, regardless of whether they are in the office, at home or in other locations. The intelligent search can be used on the move, connects to all applications and data sources, and ensures that employees have seamless IT access outside the office that does not disrupt work processes and provides targeted access to important information.
Of course, even the best technology can't replace aspects like face-to-face meetings and exchange with colleagues - and it's not supposed to. But with concepts like Hybrid Work, paired with the right tools, we can create a completely new work experience that offers great benefits for all sides. The prerequisite for this is that employees understand and embrace the corporate culture and, thanks to the technical solutions, can work from anywhere without problems: From powerful notebooks to secure connections to the corporate network and enterprise search software.
