Editor's Note: This is part two of a three-part series on the move to hybrid work.

It’s hard to remember just how dramatic of a shift we went through when it comes to working practices over the last few years. Before the pandemic, only 7% of organizations offered their employees some form of flexible working arrangements, and now, organizations the world over are on the journey to permanent hybrid or work-from-anywhere structures.

While end users have had a lot to get used to, the move to long-term remote or hybrid work has had an even greater impact on IT teams in terms of both defining and implementing a solution. For many, it has involved a number of step changes in approach—at first adding remote developers access solutions to their existing technology stack, then later understanding the need to replace the stack with an integrated solution for permanent workplace agility.

Remastering the way we work

In part one of this blog series, we talked about why hybrid and remote work options are so important to employees. Increasingly, employees are citing the lack of a hybrid work as a reason to leave, or not join, an organization. So it’s important that IT teams are delivering a solution that opens up hybrid working to everyone whose role allows, even if they have significantly differing needs.

Lessons learned by IT leaders

Lessons that IT and management teams have learned include:

  • Different personalities may need different ratios of office versus remote work, depending on their preference or need for team collaboration, continued learning, or coaching.
  • Each role requires access to a specific set of business systems, each with varying degrees of access, integration, and security.
  • Access to resources can vary by geography. Some employees took the opportunity to move away from headquarters during lockdown, and are no longer close to an office for in-person communication, collaboration, training, and support.
  • There are still many business unknowns today. There is still a possibility that your organization will need to suddenly support 100% remote work—or another work arrangement—in the future.
  • Today, most organizations still don’t yet have a full sense of how physical office space or occupancy levels will fluctuate.

Changing responsibilities for the IT role

With hybrid work now a core and ongoing business initiative, the role of IT has become increasingly strategic. In an office-centric business, the HR and facilities teams would work together to define how and where people could work, and furnish different locations to support communications, collaboration, and team working. But as physical workplaces turn increasingly digital, this emphasis on digital workflows magnifies the role of corporate IT within the organization.

This presents a huge opportunity for IT leaders, giving them the ability to improve the perceived value of themselves and their team, and to deliver a differentiator for their organization in the form of a modern workplace that supports work-from-anywhere flexibility and agility.

Delivering on the future of work

For IT teams that fear the complexity of delivering a permanent future of work foundation, it’s fair to say that with the right cloud technology, it’s quick and easy to deliver the integrated digital work experiences that every organization wants for its employees—and employees want in their organization.

Some businesses are still struggling to deliver employee (and customer) experiences that support optimal business outcomes. Yet in practice, all these needs can be met and optimized via a cloud platform. The right collaboration platform can bring together contact center, voice, video, chat, and other key business apps, to make people more productive, no matter where work occurs. Learn more about the platform to support that distributed workforce here.