Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner for a moment who were forced to ask their employees to work from home. They did not have the right processes in place for remote work. They have to rush to create makeshift arrangements which is not enough to sustain remote work for a long time.
Yes, these arrangements are good enough to get them through a year but then the cracks have started to show. As the bosses asked their employees to return back to work, this led to great resignation as most employees who are working remotely are not willing to come back to offices. They started looking for remote jobs and switched to companies which offered a more flexible option and better work life balance.
Will IT leaders continue to throw their weight behind hybrid work or will they pull out of it? What do you think? Experts suggest that CIOs will do the former. According to a Forrester report, one third of companies will fail at hybrid work and eventually have to revert back to traditional processes and systems.
Yes, this might come as a surprise to many readers but there are some concrete reasons behind this. If you are interested in learning more about those reasons then, this article is for you. In this article, you will learn about reasons why IT leaders will not be able to support hybrid work for a long time.
7 Reasons Why CIOs Could No Longer Support Hybrid Work
Here are seven reasons why CIOs will eventually have to stop their support for hybrid work.
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Financial Constraints
Probably the biggest challenge IT leaders will face will be financial constraints. They will have to work hard to convince top executives and board members in order to secure fundings from them, just like they would do when you buy dedicated server hosting. To do this, they will have to make a business case for additional investment to sustain remote work. It is not going to be easy as most businesses have already invested a lot of money and are struggling due to supply chain issues and new COVID-19 infections due to newer variants.
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Ignoring Technology Imbalances
Another common problem that most organizations have encountered while working remotely is connectivity and quality of service. As the number of communication and collaboration channels continue to grow so does the difficulty to ensure quality of service across all these challenges. IT departments are already struggling with this and finding it tough to reduce redundancies.
For instance, if your employees are living in an area which is far away from the city center, they won’t get the same internet speeds that they used to get in an office environment. Similarly, your IT team does not have the same level of visibility into employee devices when they work remotely as compared to when they are working in an office environment. This can create security concerns as well.
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Inability to Resolve Cultural Issues
No matter how good your technology infrastructure might be, if hybrid work goes against the organizational culture and norms, you will have a hard time sustaining it for a long time. You will have to change your mindset as a business leader and change what you expect from your employees especially when they are working remotely. Business leaders will have to find cultural inconsistencies and experience gaps and fix them in order to achieve success with remote work.
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Not involving HR
Another mistake most IT leaders make is they focus too much on getting buy-in from C-Suite executives that they end up ignoring the human resource department altogether. It is important for IT leaders to sit with HR leaders and understand their expectations as well. They know about employee issues more than IT leaders would ever do. This will give you a better idea about what issues you remote workers might be encountering and how you can fix them. Involve them in the decision making process so you can bring enterprise wide change instead of just revolutionizing a department.
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Lacking Agility
One lesson that this pandemic taught us is that the more agile and nimble your organization, the better chance it has to survive and thrive during tough times. Nimble companies can make the pivot more easily than large enterprises, which give them an edge during a paradigm shift or an unexpected event. The pace at which things are evolving forces businesses to be nimble and agile so they can respond to changes in a much better way. Even if you make mistakes along the way, it will help you learn and improve in the future. This can even give you a competitive advantage over competitors.
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Unable To Keep Pace With Change
Technologies and tools continue to evolve and the pace is only getting fiercer. This means that if you are using a particular tool, the new version of that tool could bring radical changes. This could increase the learning curve. That is exactly what is happening.
It is the responsibility of the IT department to create an infrastructure that can withstand that kind of change and evolution. IT leaders should get themselves acquainted with the vendor roadmaps of updates and new features they are about to introduce in the next release. Learning how to use the new features to your advantage won’t be easy for remote workers.
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IT Retention
The demand for IT and cybersecurity professionals is touching record levels. The reason is that there are more unfilled cybersecurity positions than qualified individuals who can fill them. This has made it tough for businesses to find the right talent. Even if they do it, they might struggle to retain it as IT professionals are switching their jobs. The great resignation has further complicated this problem. To train your IT team members, you will have to make them feel valued and give them learning and career growth opportunities instead of mundane tasks. Reduce their workload with automation or through shifts so they can focus on more value driven activities.
Which reason do you think will force CIOs to end their support for hybrid work? Share it with us in the comments section below.
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