Work from Home: Convenience or Culture Dilution to fixing employee experience

It all started with remote access as a convenience for working outside the office, a few decades back. Then, it evolved into a teleworking model where employees visit the office on and off only as required for meetings. Now, it has become working only from home (WOFH).

Hundreds of millions of employees have been transitioned into WFH since the onset of COVID-19 and it’s been working fine so far. This is possible because enterprise IT teams had spent sleepless nights to ensure that this model becomes operational, especially for those enterprises that predominantly work in offices.

Everyone has started adapting themselves to the new normal and found the virtues of working from home. Although some employees are reporting fatigue as they are missing the energy of the office space, fun full tea/coffee, and lunch breaks, they are seeing many positives too, including getting rid of daily commute hassles. Organizations too are reporting an increase in employee productivity by 10% to 20% as office commuting time and freewheeling discussions are either cut or reduced.

The approach to WFH program from the industry can be said as an extreme continuum with the below instances:

i. Steve Jobs was very particular about office layout to enable ‘serendipitous personal encounters’ for increased collaboration. This contrasts with Marrisa Mayer, when the former Yahoo CEO, banned telework in 2013 to get employees back home for increased collaboration, it rattled the many Yahoo employees and a huge discussion happened.

ii. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is not much enthused about permanent WFH and advocates the need for touch and social capital benefits in working out of office.

iii. Facebook, Twitter, and many other companies are announcing permanent WFH over the next few years while many companies have reportedly been rooting to get the employees back to the office.

No one size fits all the approach and it all depends on the company’s context including the nature of their customers they serve, verticals, products & services, and geographies. Nevertheless, all organizations have started looking at WFH as a viable strategy and planning to continue it even after this pandemic is brought under control.

In fact, the recent Gartner survey found that 74% of CFOs have already reported they intend to make the shift to remote work for some employees a permanent one.

Image courtesy: CenturyLink

For instance, Global Work-from-Home Experience Survey says 77% of the workforce would like to continue work from home, at least weekly, when the pandemic is over. That represents a 132 percent increase over those who did so before COVID-19.

(https://workplaceinsight.net/three-quarters-of-us-workers-want-the-choice-to-work-from-home-after-lockdown/)

Can we rely on our traditional Broadband?

This key transition and business continuity have been enabled by one key service: Broadband. One interesting quote read recently was:

“Broadband has become electricity of the 21st Century”

- Brad Smith, President of Microsoft in 2015

That’s true in some sense. But does consumer broadband including 4G deliver consistent quality and required security/safety as the electricity delivers. Or at least, can it match the quality offered by the enterprise’s office network? No, not yet, and not in the near future due to the very nature of Internet technology and the way the ISPs offer the service.

But, countries like India, which is ranked at a low 126 on a fixed broadband subscription per individual, which is roughly 1.33 connection per 100 individual, which made employees primarily dependent on a mobile cellular connection, but even that is not good or reliable, with patchy connectivity and frequent call drops results into compromising business-critical. Even,

Home internet is not secure since many workers are now working from home and probably on their own devices, which can lure bad actors to get into your database very easily and your valuable information can be compromised.

Some well known and challenging facts:

1. Many organizations are not equipped for network security.
2. Data breaches are one of the most upsetting truths in an organization.
3. IT professionals are experiencing challenges with data privacy.
4. Organizations say data loss and leakage are the main security problems when employees use their own devices.

This lack of consistent internet connectivity and sudden spurt in cyberattacks targeting the WFH endpoint systems makes this working model fragile. This situation is getting exacerbated considering the Internet connectivity (Wired or 4G/5G) is being shared with family members (kids online classes and video streamings) which impact both available quality bandwidths (QoS) to the employee and render enterprise networks highly vulnerable.

Since reliable connectivity & network security are more than hygiene factors, it would have a negative impact on seamless collaboration and puts further strain on the organization’s culture. Already, organizations are reporting difficulties in having a smooth onboarding of new hires.

According to reports, the availability of 4G networks in India reportedly ranges from 76% to 97%, while the download speed ranges from 3mbps to less than 9mbps, and the upload speeds are much lower.

With all family members sharing the same broadband connection, In fact, a survey by Pulse Q&A suggests that 77% of the workforce is spending more on video conferencing tools. It’s getting difficult to cope up. Also, 43% of IT leaders believe that their tech stack won’t be able to cope up.

With increased bandwidth and cybersecurity requirements, it’s getting difficult for CIOs to cope with the situation. Security concerns have also climbed up in the priority list since malware attacks are suddenly increased amid the disruption caused due to lockdown. They have to increase the budget for VPN and end-point security, which eventually leads to an increase in Opex.

This need for investment in network and application monitoring was reinforced by a recent 451 Research report that found 41% of tech leaders are feeling the strain of increased traffic on their IT resources. Risk is also a concern as 40% of audit leaders ranked IT security as their first COVID-19 related business concern in a new Gartner survey.

The question is how businesses are going to handle this in many more months to come? Luckily, they have started exploring new solutions that can solve their significant tangible problems. That is deploying branch SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) playbooks into homes, although in different form factors and commercials models. It’s pretty clear that in the current economic turmoil scenario, deploying off-the-shelf SD-WAN for homes wouldn’t make the cut.

This brings the need for a simple solution with a pragmatic approach: SD-WAN Lite.

Experience SD-WAN Lite for Home

One size doesn’t fit all and WFH requirements clearly vary among the industry verticals, employee functions, and roles. For workforce in process-oriented industries (like ITeS), customer experience (CX), and support roles, it’s highly critical to have a consistent internet quality for meeting customer delivery SLA and improved security to meet the compliance requirements.

Businesses may provide dual Internet links at home although there are feasibility issues in delivering broadband in some of the sub-urban, Tier-2, and Tier-3 towns. Despite being expensive and difficult to roll out in thousands of locations, this dual Internet model alone wouldn’t solve the seamless connectivity and security problems.

What SD-WAN Lite can do you?

1. Increased availability and better quality of Internet & VPN through dual broadband or LTE.
2. Secure the endpoint by reducing the attack surface through whitelisted access to the Internet
3. Delivers the right allocation of bandwidth using QoS
4. User URL access tracking to enable secure operations and process compliance
5. Link quality monitoring & user traffic visibility
6. Alerts & notifications for Internet links related up/down

Finally, the solution’s commercial model should be viable for businesses easy to roll-out and manage at scale.

SD-WAN Lite for Home can be a good first step towards building the strong bridge connecting businesses and their employees seamlessly and upon which a softer Cultural fabric and engagement can be laid.

Now, many CEOs including Facebook’s Zuckerberg are now talking about setting up many distributed/decentralized ‘work-hubs’ as a balance instead of having a large campus. This pattern resembles that of enterprise DC shifting to Cloud from on-premises and now exploring Edge computing, as a middle path.

Whether we see increased WFH or distributed ‘Work Hub’ models, businesses & CIOs should plan for Work from anywhere and provide employees secure and superior connectivity for seamless collaboration.