Canadian Government Executive - Volume 26 - Issue 03

TECHNOLOGY 16 / Canadian Government Executive // May/June 2020 As this new normal of eventualities takes shape and shifts over upcoming years, organizations with solid, reliable tools that enable teams to connect and collaborate in ways that efficiently join office, home, and mobile workers will be best positioned to serve the public interest. T he initial scramble to transition office workers to home-based employees in response to the CO- VID-19 crisis is behind us. Mirror- ing a country-wide 72 per cent decline in office-based work, public servants through- out Canada are adapting well to doing their jobs to the best of their abilities while con- fined to their homes. Initial indicators are positive. Some reports, based on aggregate data, show that Canadians have in fact in- creased their overall productivity by up to 25 per cent. But as the economy slowly begins to open up, schools, government agencies, and businesses are planning for a staggered return of some workers and a transformed workplace that will be charac- terized by ongoing change. The emergence of the post-COVID-9 workplace is the be- ginning of a new normal that will encom- pass workers across a mix of environments – home-based, mobile, and onsite. The key to making this distributed workforce pro- ductive is the ability to easily collaborate among teams, management, and staff. Those with the technology, training, and know-how to effectively collaborate re- motely are without a doubt best equipped to maintain the positive productivity trend. As noted by Chief Human Resource Officer Nancy Chahwan, while most gov- ernment employees have the standard equipment needed to rapidly adapt to re- mote work (i.e., likely a laptop and a smart- phone), this will not suffice on an ongoing basis for many. Our workforce needs the tools and training to replicate the commu- nication and collaboration that underly their in-office productivity and efficiency. Now is the time to begin planning and lay- ing a path to long term success. For the foreseeable future, the “work- place” will be an entirely different beast. Research suggests that the coronavirus will present in a yet unknown pattern of waves until a vaccine is developed and widely distributed. The general consensus among epidemiologists is a horizon of at least two years. Until we reach that point in time, we can expect the workplace to continue to shift and evolve to support a mix of employees working across home- based, mobile, and onsite locations. Based on this assessment, likely work- place scenarios include: • Rotating office (or classroom): A percent - age of the workforce/students alternat- ing days in and out of the office • Staggered return: A small percentage of employees return in phases over time • Permanent distributed teams: A large percentage of the workforce does not re- turn to the office • Hybrid approaches: A mix of in-office, home, and mobile employees Whichever of these scenarios comes to pass, one constant and fundamental re- quirement will be the need for efficient collaboration. Steps to take now Crisis creates change. But will it last? Many predict that the swift switch to re- mote work will result in a decentralized and a more distributed workforce, which could result in substantial cost savings through increased efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction. For this future reality to unfold, strong communications and collaboration tools are critical. The next steps require optimizing virtual ca- pabilities beyond home-based laptops by adding enhanced conferencing and cloud- based collaboration tools. By Deidre Deacon Virtual collaboration: A guide to short-term planning for long-term gains 1 Move to the cloud. Adopting a cloud-first strategy ensures that critical applications are redundant, resilient, and available everywhere at a relatively low cost. This applies to collabo- ration systems as well as sensitive cloud computing. In fact, the more key functions you can serve from the cloud, the better, as it ensures anywhere, anytime access. A hybrid workforce approach could be what works best for your team, in which case cloud apps will efficiently bridge the di- vide between in-office and remote work- ers. When supporting a fully distributed workforce, cloud-based systems will keep all members of the team connected and collaborating. In any scenario, harboring your apps and information in the cloud reduces costs and provides loss-proof re- dundancy. Across North America, for organizations that have already transitioned to support virtual workspaces, we estimate that 70 to 90 per cent of their infrastructure and apps reside in the cloud. However, a sur- prising number of companies remain far from achieving that level today. 2 Standardize content sharing and ‘virtual’ conference room tech- nology. By deploying standardized content sharing solutions and interactive display capabilities youwill enable amore integrated, virtual collaboration function that closely replicates the in-office expe- rience. Wherever your organization is in the transformation to the cloud, there are simple solutions to bring these benefits to