The direction of business and technology has been irreversibly transformed in the last few years. How have this affected sectors around the world?
There are many different sectors and industries around the world, but one of the things that have been an increasingly common factor among all of them has been the reliance on information technology – or IT. As technology has advanced, we have seen accompanying advancements in business processes and cultures. Since 2020, there have been significant changes to conventional work, as well as an acceleration of trends that were already underway; all of which have been due to COVID-19. We discussed this with TechQuarters, a London-based managed service provider specialising in IT services, and Microsoft Office 365 consultancy. Since the onset of COVID-19, they have been prioritising helping organisations with IT modernization so that they could implement hybrid and remote working – as it has been widely agreed that these models of working are the future of modern business.
Key Elements of Hybrid and Remote Working
Hybrid and remote working are very similar. This is not just because both involve people working outside of their employer’s premises; but because the success of both is dependent upon the same critical elements…
- Flexibility – One could argue that flexibility is the defining characteristic of both models of working. Both remote and hybrid working enables workers to access their work at any time, in any place. Furthermore, without flexibility, much of the value that remote and hybrid working brings to a business will be lost.
- Collaboration – The success of remote and hybrid working is also dependent on organisations enabling and encouraging high-quality collaboration between teams and departments. When workforces do not have central premises where they can gather to collaborate and brainstorm, they need to have digital tools to ensure they can still connect to work together.
- Security – Perhaps the most important element of both models of working is the need for stringent, cutting-edge cybersecurity. When workforces are accessing company data outside of the organisation’s central premises, extra precautions must be made to protect that data.
Since hybrid and remote working have become more popular, these elements of businesses have been receiving a lot more attention from the average organisation – and this is just one of the many ways that hybrid work is changing business.
Examples of Sectors Influenced by Hybrid Working
So, we know that hybrid and remote working has had an indelible impact on business – but what are some examples of sectors and industries that have seen new trends emerge as a result of them?
Education
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools had to be shut down due to the risk of infection being significantly higher with lots of students and teachers in the same building together. As a result, the education sector had to make efforts to adjust using techniques borrowed from remote working. As a provider of IT support for Education providers, TechQuarters was able to tell us how hybrid working lead to many clients looking into new solutions. Some examples include enterprise-grade communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, which have several specialised functions designed for virtual classrooms.
Law
Most professional industries were impacted by the social restrictions that were imposed due to COVID-19. We asked TechQuarters for another example and they pointed to the legal sector, as they have been providing IT support Law Firms have been using for over a decade. According to them, the main challenges for these organisations were ensuring everyone could communicate with one another within the business, and making sure the organisation could still liaise with clients. This led to an increased interest in virtual communications solutions. When remote working began to give way to hybrid working, the changes law firms had made enabled them to operate in more efficient and productive ways, as they were able to pair what they had learned with remote working, with their office-based workflows to improve business agility.
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