TALKING

Simply asking employees what makes them more productive and then licensing and supporting that , may go some way to resolving the issue . that have different characteristics that make them suited to certain usage scenarios .

Employees are already likely to be aware that some applications work better for them than others . Simply asking employees what makes them more productive and then licensing and supporting that , may go some way to resolving the issue .

More bandwidth is also useless if any part of the endto-end connection is over contended . An employee ’ s home environment might have multiple family members working remotely and home-schooled kids using the same Internet connection and the same contention based Wi-Fi network at the same time . The Internet service provider may also have highly contended pipes upstream that keep its Internet plan costs low but that can impede connection to the outside Internet .

Suppose an employer is paying some or all of the cost of an employee ’ s home connection , they might have some visibility into bandwidth problems and be able to advocate on the employees ’ behalf for a fix .

This is still the exception rather than the rule , with 80 % of remote workers paying the full cost of their Internet . They may be limited by what they can afford , what services exist where they live and by their living arrangements .

Employers may be able to optimize applications in their control to make better use of available compute power . They may be able to move an application , or aspects of the way it executes , closer to the user – for example , pre-fetching or caching data instead of constantly hitting a centralized data store , which may be impacted by transient network conditions .

Road four : Establish visibility

If an application is bought from a third-party , it may be possible to pursue optimizations directly through them . For example , in response to temporary bandwidth pressures in Australia , Netflix changed its video codec to be less bandwidth-intensive until networks could stabilise and recover .

Many enterprises are large enough to have sway with the application providers they partner with . But the provider is likely to want evidence before identifying and activating optimization opportunities .

They may also have limited to no visibility into where – between their desktop and workplace – performance bottlenecks exist . That makes it hard to do much about it .

Road three : Employers , be a bit flexible !

A third tactic employers might deploy is to make smarter application choices that take into account the different characteristics of applications and of home Internet connections .

This might mean tuning in-house applications to match the environment or supporting multiple collaboration , videoconferencing or other common enterprise tools

Similarly , if an Internet provider ’ s network or the lastmile connection is the bottleneck to performance , the provider may be able to make changes on their end , such as route optimization to reduce the number of network ‘ hops ’ or remediation of the physical connection . Again , though , they are likely to want proof they are the bottleneck before they act .

Visibility and insights into the networked application characteristics and paths , therefore , becomes critical in order to validate performance issues with the responsible third-party provider . With hard data points , organizations can approach a provider and partner with them to fix the issue and enhance the digital experience . On the flipside , it may also remove any suspicion that a provider is the cause of an issue ; by identifying the root cause and responsible party enabling investigations and remediation to continue at pace .

Hybrid work is here to stay and how organizations decide to show up will have a big impact on how employees experience the digital services and applications that they rely on to do their jobs , connect and collaborate . In a time when employees play an increasingly critical role in driving success and the war for talent intensifies , the question is : which road will you take ? p

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