TALKING

Organizations not set up for them have already done some hard yards putting enabling systems and practices in place to invest in technologies that accommodate employees who now want to work from anywhere . For employers , it ’ s a matter of retaining top talent and making sure that employees remain connected and productive without compromise to security or collaboration .

In the hybrid work model , the employee office has become a branch office of one and making sure that the employee ’ s experience of digital services and SaaS applications stays intact has become a challenge for IT considering the variation in the digital path employees take into an employer ’ s system across cloud and Internet networks .

For organizations that are in this situation , I see four different roads that they can go down .

Several bear a strategic similarity to a coping mechanism in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , which suggested mapping out things that concern you and things you have control over . By focusing on what you can control , you shift attention away from what you can ’ t .

This is as true for employee experience as it is for personal psychology . There are things that organizations – employers – can do now that are within their purview to make the employee experience better while ameliorating outside concerns .

Road one : Do nothing

The first tactic employers might opt for is to do nothing at all . It requires no investment on the employer ’ s part but comes at a high cost where it ’ s difficult to guarantee any sort of consistent user experience .

Instead , you have staff connecting through different Internet providers , on different speed plans , over different types of telecommunications infrastructure , on different devices with different throughput capabilities and at different distances from the office , all trying to congregate virtually in one or a handful of platforms .

This might represent the current state in some hybrid or remote work environments but there ’ s no future in it .

The alternative is to acknowledge the existence of performance problems and to do something about them .

Road two : Throw bandwidth at the problem

A second tactic would be to throw more bandwidth at the problem . This could work and if nothing else is likely to be at least some part of the solution .

Bandwidth is important but it doesn ’ t solely equate to performance .

A fatter pipe isn ’ t going to necessarily make applications perform any faster . You ’ d be surprised what levels of bandwidth an application can actually function over , leveraging differing requirements for upload and download , even temporarily dropping down on quality to stay operational on lower bandwidth connections , if required .

Mike Hicks , Principal Solutions Architect at Cisco ThousandEyes

The alternative is to acknowledge the existence of performance problems and to do something about them .

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