What Hybrid Work Requirements Mean for the Digital Workplace
With its inherent flexibility, elimination of long commute hours, and increased comfort, hybrid work is a trend that is here to stay. These significant benefits are why, 16% of employees worldwide and a staggering 43% in Singapore will consider leaving their jobs if asked to commit fully to on-site work. Thus, underscoring the value employees place on hybrid work conditions.
Encouragingly, productivity data backs up the viability of a hybrid digital workforce. Organisations that embrace hybrid working conditions experience an 8% increase in employee engagement, a 7% increase in inclusion, and a 5% increase in productivity. These encouraging statistics have led governmental agencies to consider implementing hybrid working legislature to optimise the workforce.
Legislation such as the new Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests and others worldwide underscore the rising importance of hybrid work. This legal support validates the trend and provides a framework for its successful implementation. Despite the private and public sectors embracing the need for hybrid work arrangements, multiple challenges to its successful implementation exist. These challenges include stabilising the digital technologies that enable collaboration within the digital workplace, integrating an organisation’s culture in digital workspaces, and ensuring cybersecurity.
Challenges in Implementing Hybrid Workplace Requirements
Building successful digital workplaces is not without its challenges. Organisations must be prepared to overcome significant hurdles in technology implementation. These challenges include accessing collaborative digital solutions, eliminating downtime, and securing collaborative processes. By acknowledging these challenges, organisations can better prepare for the task at hand.
In today’s hybrid environment, 82% of employees have been late or missed meetings due to technical issues with IT systems. Also, 48% of employees feel they use too many collaborative tools, which confuses the workforce. 26% say that app switching, which involves switching across multiple platforms while working, reduces productivity. While 25% state that using multiple collaborative tools makes accessing documents and data for work challenging. The struggles of utilising multiple collaborative solutions across platforms risk causing excessive downtime that minimises productivity.
The dynamic cybersecurity landscape and its effect on the digital workplace hamper productivity and, in extreme situations, a business's viability. The projected annual increase in cybersecurity incidents means approximately 80% of organisations can expect attacks on digital platforms that enable hybrid working environments.
A Survey of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) highlighted the diverse threats they fear. 45% of the CISOs listed malware and ransomware attacks as their major security worries, and 34% feared the effects of business email compromise on their digital platforms, which facilitates hybrid work. In conclusion, 72% of CISOs in Singapore are willing to pay ransom to secure stolen data.
Navigating the Challenges Implementing a Hybrid, Digital Workplace
As the Tripartite Guidelines for Flexible Work Arrangement suggests, appointing a digital transformation leader to develop a hybrid working framework is critical to a successful implementation. The leader or CISO can implement a successful hybrid policy by adopting a bottom-up approach that seeks the input of employees.
The choice of technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration across the digital workplace must also consider employees who are the end-users. A single platform capable of managing scheduling, planning, document sharing, and hosting large meetings or peer-to-peer communications is recommended. The chosen digital platform should also be capable of embedding existing proprietary and legacy software apps that are critical for work.
Examples such as M&S and Mandai Wildlife Group showcase how large and smaller organisations use singular platforms with a suite of productivity tools to facilitate the digital workplace. M&S leveraged Microsoft Teams and Power Apps to streamline collaboration and build communication tools to support its extensive digital workforce and track inventory.
For Mandai Wildlife, Microsoft's digital transformation solutions were used to transform conventional collaboration processes and facilitate remote work digitally. The result for both organisations was increased efficiency and a boost in productivity across M&S’s seventy thousand employees and Mandai Wildlife’s 20-man workforce.
Dealing with the cybersecurity challenges associated with the digital workforce requires a three-tier strategy – educating employees, working with cybersecurity experts, and constant vigilance. Creating awareness about the dangers of using unsecured Wi-Fi or devices, user authorisation, and incident response policies ensure employees do not fall into traps set by bad actors.
The operational technology and endpoints facilitating hybrid, digital workplaces also bring security challenges. Hackers routinely search for and exploit discovered zero-day vulnerabilities within the hardware solutions deployed to enable the digital workforce. Examples include the BIAS and KNOB authentication vulnerabilities when pairing Jabra Bluetooth-enabled devices to computer systems. Bad actors can apply brute force to hijack pairings with Bluetooth devices to gain access to digital workspaces.
Implementing a cybersecurity policy that includes the need for constant vigilance, routine updates, and a defined incident response process reduces the effectiveness of threat actors. Organisations can also leverage the expertise and cybersecurity capabilities that managed services provide. Service providers integrate security by default policies into built applications and retain dedicated security teams to respond to incidents in real-time.
Hybrid Workplaces are the Future of Business
Hybrid work conditions combine remote work with on-site hours and offer employees the flexibility to choose. This flexibility is attractive to the average worker, and organisations that successfully implement hybrid working environments increase productivity and reduce employee attrition rate by a third.
Successful implementation of hybrid workplaces must address employee difficulties with app switching and the cybersecurity challenges digital platforms experience. Consequently, using a unified collaboration platform and working with a digital transformation partner will help optimise hybrid workplaces for growth.
Choosing the right digital transformation partner will help optimise your digital workplace's work culture, security, communication, and collaborative efforts.
How can we help?
As a pioneer in document solutions for over 50 years, FUJIFILM Business Innovation Singapore has a deep understanding of how businesses operate. Our mission is to empower organisations to work efficiently and effectively in the digital age. We offer a comprehensive suite of digital transformation solutions and services, partnering our customers in managing data to automate workflows, leverage data intelligence, and build exceptional customer experiences.
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