4 first steps to easily support your hybrid workers’ needs
Great employee experiences start with the right long-term plan for a digital workplace that supports their needs – regardless of location.

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The digital workplace has undergone rapid changes, making it difficult to develop long-term strategies for your workforce. During the height of the pandemic, user experiences were secondary to just making sure work got done. Now, it’s time to shift from survival to success by enabling great employee experiences and supporting a hybrid workforce. To start, you’ll need to define a strategy that supports your employees and meets their expectations – regardless of location.

1. Listen to your employees

Supporting a hybrid workforce begins with understanding what your employee experiences and expectations are. In Microsoft’s recent Work Trends Index report, 54% of managers say leadership is out of touch with employees. Intentional communication and collaboration are necessary in empowering a workforce to succeed across locations and mediums.

The heightened need to improve employee retention creates an opportunity to rethink the workplace and find what works for your teams. When Intel, Lenovo, and Forrester surveyed employees about the top areas where their companies needed to improve, the most common answer (by a considerable margin) was simply listening to employees’ needs. The more input employees have on their technology, the happier and more productive they’ll be.

2. Leverage your managers

Creating a workplace strategy that meets everyone’s needs takes revolutionary intent to communicate and collaborate. Managers play a critical role in bridging the gap between leadership and employees.

Modern Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) strategies can redefine the connection between your employees and leadership by enabling team continuity across locations and devices. Communication platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Slack have proven popular with organizations and management because they empower teams to continue their workflow and get updates in real time, regardless of where individual team members work.

When you pair these platforms with a cloud-enabled virtual desktop solution that makes your business tools accessible across any device, your management will have the tools they need to truly listen to and work with their teams, which is essential to staying in touch with the needs of your employees.

3. Utilize every source of data possible

Modern device management unlocks access to enormous amounts of data, giving you the opportunity to make informed decisions about the hardware, software, and services your teams use to achieve your business’ objectives. That’s easier said than done, though, as understanding the data you collect requires time, resources, and a strategy for acting on it.

Trusted strategic partners can help identify the right management tools for your business so you can collect easy-to-understand insights on device performance, technology adoption, and employee sentiment. With this actionable data, you can improve employee experience and optimize your digital workplace with a long-term strategy that solves your teams’ pain points.

4. Start at the end

Implementing a tool just because it worked for another company doesn’t mean it will work for yours. To find the right solutions, start with your goals, needs, and desired outcomes. The best technology transformation stories stand out because the solution actually provided the needed outcome.

Consider, for example, SHI’s recent work with one of the largest integrated care providers in the U.S. This organization needed to deploy a remote work solution for thousands of essential team members. SHI helped them create 2,000 Amazon WorkSpaces with quickly scalable Virtual Desktop instances, allowing their employees to access mission-critical business applications across a secure connection to corporate networks – all from their home offices and devices.

Leveraging vendor-agnostic specialists will help paint a more accurate picture of the tools that will best fit your ideal digital workplace – one that solves issues, enables productivity, and enhances employee experience.

This is only the beginning. Further explore how to create a digital workplace that works for you by speaking with one of our experts today.