The rise of the hybrid work environment is here to stay, leaving businesses having to deal with the challenge of making workers feel connected and able to effortlessly collaborate from geographically dispersed locations.

Adaptavist’s global report¹ revealed Australia had the highest percentage of hybrid workers compared with US, Canada and UK, and by late 2022 34% of Australian workers were already working hybrid (in office and remote). Extensive analysis² has shown most workers prefer hybrid and expect future organisational plans to allow them to remain hybrid based. It begs the question - how does this impact organisational culture?

Industry leaders agree, strong culture is a cornerstone that drives positive business outcomes. The culture being the shared values and established framework of behaviour, principles, and priorities. The challenge is to create an environment where employees feel connected to the culture. Those who do feel connected are far more likely to be engaged, productive and less likely to leave.

To attract talent and stay competitive, organisational cultures need to be in alignment with what employees are looking for. For this reason, business leaders should be asking – “how many of our employees feel truly connected to our organisation, its purpose and culture?”

For workers to feel a meaningful connection, the hybrid model needed is one that engenders well-being, satisfaction, and efficiency, regardless of the work location. The challenge to developing seamless productivity that leads to increased profitability isn’t new. However in 2023 business managers are concerned that dispersed workers are becoming less connected and are trying to figure out new ways to communicate and engage with their teams.

Implementing a hybrid work program that uplifts the employee experience is key. This would include ways to make employees feel their time spent in the office is worth the commute, and how remote workers communicate with each other. This is where technology and communication platforms play an important role.

Optimised connectivity is foundational to an organisation’s ability to ensure workers have secure and reliable access to the data, regardless of location. The trick is to find the balance between connectivity that enables open seamless collaboration with robust data security.

This can be especially difficult to achieve if an organisation is using a combination of infrastructure platforms spread across multiple locations such as hybrid cloud, colocation, and on-premise that haven’t been specifically fine-tuned to support their needs. This can result in inefficient workloads, high latency connections and security gaps. Such degraded environments generally causes lowered productivity, increased frustration, and reduced worker engagement.

Optimised colocation data centre services together with hybrid cloud can play a vital role in supporting your remote workers by providing them with reliable, secure, low latency connectivity. What’s the difference between the two?

• Hybrid cloud refers to a combination of public and private cloud resources, allowing organisations to store some data and applications in a public cloud and others in a private cloud.

• Colocation, on the other hand, involves housing IT infrastructure in a secure outsourced data centre facility. For example, organisations can use hybrid cloud to store critical data and applications, while using colocation to house their physical IT infrastructure, such as servers and networking equipment. This can provide a secure and reliable environment for employees to access data and applications from anywhere, while also ensuring your business connectivity is highly available and can be easily scaled up or down as needed.

Optimising workloads across these platforms ensure organisations stay competitive, productive, and can enable their workers to remain connected and engaged, regardless of where they are working.

1. Digital_Etiquette-Reinventing_Work_Report | Adaptavist
2. The Future of Work 2022 | Accenture