The hybrid work discussions continue – and the argument that hybrid work is here to stay might not play out, says TechAisle.
58% of employees within the US SMB and midmarket firms expect to work from home at least till the end of 2021, in sharp contrast to pre-pandemic in 2019 when 29% of small business (1-99) employees, 9% of employees within midmarket firms (100-999), and 7% within upper-midmarket firms (1000-4999), who worked from home. However, the work from home trend may not play out in the longer term. Encouraged by the increasing rate of vaccinations and economic recovery, 61% to 67% of firms plan to bring back all employees to the office by early 2022. Only 22% are planning for a phased or staggered approach to re-opening offices as soon as it is safe to do so. Higher employee size businesses are likely to be more aggressive in their re-opening plans than the smaller businesses. 11% of firms will most likely permanently adopt an approach allowing some of their employees to work from home indefinitely.
Overall, 97% of mainstream businesses (1 to 5000 employees) feel unprepared to having a long-term remote and hybrid workforce work environment. Between 17% and 44% of small businesses to upper midmarket firms’ IT staff is challenged in identifying and deploying hybrid workplace solutions.
What does research from Webroot say?
When surveyed, 46% said that remote working was rolled out at a bit of a faster pace than they would have liked.
A combination of device-sharing, the distractions that comes with working from home, and the need for swift cloud migration has resulted in security dilemmas that many SMBs do not have the resources to tackle alone, creating an ideal environment for cyber criminals to flourish.
61% of participants believe that risks to their organisations have increased either moderately or severely as a result of remote working, with an additional 31% reporting a marginal increase in risk.
32% said that they struggled to access their endpoint monitoring system remotely, with just 38% having implemented a Zero Trust security model.
Why do we care?
I asked this last week, and I’ll say it again. The conversation is not enough about the WHY. WHY are companies going back? Why would they stay remote? Why would they go hybrid.
You have the opportunity to design any kind of business operations you want. What would you design, and why? Answer THAT question for your business, and you will outperform.
