Is your business ready to return to the office?

With the 'new normal' here to stay, it’s time for businesses to start seriously thinking about how they can adapt long-term

If digital transformation felt like a fast-paced game before the coronavirus pandemic, it must now seem like a blur to many organisations.

Just a few short months ago, businesses were still mapping out their digital transformation strategy slowly and cautiously, phasing in new technologies and processes over months or even years. Today, those digital initiatives need to be rolled out and scaled up in a matter of weeks.

It's a sobering thought. For a while, the fallout from the pandemic was perhaps seen as a bump in the road - a short-term storm that could be weathered before things went back to normal. However, as we move through 2020 it's becoming clearer that these drastic digital shifts are here to stay, creating what many are now calling the "new normal". With this on the horizon, it's time for businesses to start seriously thinking about how they can adapt long-term.

Playing the long game

Technology has always been the cornerstone of business, but 2020 has accelerated our use of technology to new heights. We live and work in a time when video calls can be made seamlessly, where people in different countries can collaborate on the same document, and where virtual workstations and cloud applications make remote working easier than ever. If that was valuable before the lockdown, it's going to be essential as we come out of it.

While the pandemic crisis may have accelerated the move to digital for many, these moves should be seen as a long-term investment as opposed to a reactionary emergency measure. Those organisations who had already adopted this mindset were best poised to deal with the crisis, allowing them to continue working unhindered.

Ensuring business continuity

At its heart, digital transformation is all about continuity, flexibility and the ability to bounce back quickly from any potential setbacks. Part of what drives businesses toward the cloud, for example, is that storing their data off-site in a secure data centre makes them more resilient in the event of a crisis. We've seen disaster recovery and back-up solutions evolve at breakneck speed over the past decade, and it's highly likely that we'll see more businesses adopting them as they emerge from lockdown. These services are crucial to protecting companies from unforeseen events, but they also make it far easier to relocate, work remotely or transfer data.

What about remote working?

How much of a role remote working will play in the so-called "new normal" remains to be seen, but in the past few months, it's forced businesses and their teams to re-evaluate the way they operate. This chance to reflect has, on balance, been a good thing for most organisations.

While the buzz of the office will no doubt be missed by many employees, most will have noted some unexpected benefits of moving to remote working. The morning commute will have become a distant memory, introducing a new work-life balance that allows for more time with family and friends. Some members of staff will even note their productivity and morale rising, racing through tasks that otherwise take them twice as long in a busy office full of distractions. Of course, there will also be countless team-members itching to get back to the office. Perhaps they work better in a busy environment or don't have the right kind of space at home to get through a working day comfortably.

Either way, the common theme here is flexibility - giving employees the option to work in a way that suits them. This form of agile working has always been one of the goals of digital transformation; the pandemic has simply kicked things up a gear. While some businesses no doubt already had remote working policies and flexi-working options built into some contracts, they're now confronted with the challenge of making these policies work at scale across their entire workforce. That might mean switching to cloud-based applications and utilising technology like virtual desktops in order to make employees more agile without compromising on productivity.

Even if going back to the office full-time becomes possible, businesses will likely need to evaluate how they work on-premise. Social distancing is likely to be with us for a while, meaning more space will be needed. Manual processes will be digitised where possible, and the adoption of AI technologies like voice assistants is likely to increase rapidly.

Digital transformation has been a top priority for businesses for years now, but as they emerge from lockdown, organisations are going to have to think even more carefully about their plans for growth. Each business will play a key role in helping to shape the new normal but, much like the old one, it's going to be a fast-paced landscape with cloud and digital technology at the very centre.

Jon Lucas is co-founder of Hyve Managed Hosting