The war between employers who want workers to return to the office and the employees who want to maintain the flexibility and work-life balance of remote and hybrid working is just beginning to play out. The eventual winner in this showdown more likely will be determined by outside and macro-economic forces than by any particular battle won on either side. In the meantime, there appears to be an emerging equilibrium around remote work, said researchers at the Conference Board. Despite the buzz around RTO orders, surveys at the end of last year show just 4 percent of CEOs in the U.S. and Europe are looking to reduce remote work initiatives, while 5 percent are looking to expand them. A similar 5 percent of CEOs in the U.S. and only 2 percent in Europe list “returning workers to physical workplaces” as a human capital management priority in 2023. By last count, across a wide selection of surveys in the fourth quarter of last year, somewhere between a third and half or more of companies still embrace remote and hybrid work arrangements. (That compares to the 2 to 3 percent of companies that did the same pre-pandemic.) And those companies, research and data from the fourth quarter suggest, express little or no interest in abandoning their spending on solutions and technologies that enable remote and hybrid working. That’s pretty good news considering remote work tech has been a major emphasis for IT executives the past few years. Priorities have changed, of course. After the initial mad dash and massive dollars spent to keep suddenly out-of-office workers connected and collaborating, attention has turned to managing, optimizing and securing flexible workforce and workplace arrangements, as well as correcting some of the compromises that had to be made early on for the sake of basic business continuity. And since company workforces and their IT assets both directly impact virtually all parts of an operation, emerging interest in remote solutions now can be found up and down the technology stack. For a trusted technology advisor, this means expertise in dealing with the challenges of remote, hybrid and mobile working can offer a natural inroad to all manner of network, communications and managed IT solutions. It’s not hard to understand, after all, how an inevitably increasing number of remote and mobile employees, smart machines and IoT devices goes hand-in-hand with increasing demand for several ancillary solutions such as quality connectivity, security, edge computing, backhaul, storage, device and device management, remote monitoring, collaboration and human capital management, among others. The necessity of this solution ecosystem to optimizing flexible workforce strategies is likely why more than a third of businesses recently surveyed by 451 Research said having the technologies to effectively support remote work is a top challenge their organization will face in supporting a distributed workforce. Attack the Technology Stack with Remote Solutions 6 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com Martin Vilaboy Editor-in-Chief martin@bekabusinessmedia.com Bruce Christian Senior Editor bruce@bekabusinessmedia.com Brady Hicks Contributing Editor brady@bekabusinessmedia.com Percy Zamora Art Director percy@bekabusinessmedia.com Rob Schubel Digital Manager rob@bekabusinessmedia.com Jennifer Vilaboy Production Manager jen@bekabusinessmedia.com Berge Kaprelian Group Publisher berge@bekabusinessmedia.com (480) 503-0770 Anthony Graffeo Publisher anthony@bekabusinessmedia.com (203) 304-8547 Michael Burns National Account Executive michael@bekabusinessmedia.com (262) 993-9116 Beka Business Media Berge Kaprelian President and CEO Corporate Headquarters 10115 E Bell Road, Suite 107 - #517 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260 Voice: 480.503.0770 Email: berge@bekabusinessmedia.com © 2023 Beka Business Media, All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in any form or medium without express written permission of Beka Business Media is prohibited. RWS and the RWS logo are trademarks of Beka Business Media
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