3 tips for IT leaders building a hybrid workplace
Technology has always been known to move quickly — but today, organizations and employees are moving at the speed of light. The office, which was once a place of mandated stability, is now just one of the many places people get work done. And with this ongoing push for hybrid and remote work comes more content silos, miscommunication between teams, and gaps in security.
So how do you prevent your company from being the next headline? That's the biggest question keeping admins up at night. To help keep your IT team firing on all cylinders, here are three simple tips for leaders when building a productive and secure workplace.
Get organized to keep everyone on the same page
It sounds simple, but clear organization is the best way to keep teams focused and on task. Too much time spent combing through content silos for information leads to distraction and frustration. Not to mention the gaps in knowledge that occur when key members of the team are unavailable, on vacation, or happen to move on to other roles.
While implementing processes can be just that — a process — giving teams clear instruction and direction allows distributed employees to work more seamlessly.
Tip 💡: If you use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or other messaging platforms, set clear goals and descriptions for every channel of communication to ensure valuable information can be shared in the right place and accessed by the correct people. Additionally, whether you use Box or another content platform, establish a process for where your team saves all information with clearly labeled folders that everyone can access.
Build security in at the base
As flexible work has grown more popular, so have malicious cyber-attacks. Unfortunately, well-intentioned security solutions have earned bad reputations within organizations over the years, as employees often find them to be cumbersome barriers between accessing the information they need and getting the job done.
From Mark Schooley, Senior Director, IT Operations and Engineering at Box: “Security needs to be the first question you address when you’re considering data moving in and out and around your organization. While it would be ideal to be the most locked down organization on the planet, the reality is that this level of security is extremely difficult on employees. Our goal is to build an ecosystem within the organization with tools that support strong security and a frictionless end user experience. This ensures that employees always have secure and seamless access to the information they need, working from any device and from any location.”
Tip 💡: Select tools that have frictionless security built in (rather than bolted on) so that you can have total peace of mind without slowing work down. Choosing tools that do the heavy security lifting for you not only provides relief to IT teams, but it also ensures content stays secure from any location without unnecessary barriers to slow employees down.
Relationships are key
As hybrid and remote work expands, teams should look beyond their immediate members and prioritize connecting with other groups.
For a successful IT leader, this means reaching beyond your day-to-day contacts and forming strong internal relationships with Security, Legal, and Compliance teams. By developing an ongoing and open relationship with other internal teams, you’ll have the ability to talk more freely about goals, plans, and concerns. In addition, this gives outside teams a better understanding of your priorities and can speed up decision making.
Tip 💡: Schedule monthly check-ins with members of adjacent teams so that you can improve cross-functional communication and cover off on concerns and issues more proactively.
To wrap things up…
While hybrid work helps to create great opportunities, like the flexibility to get work done how, when, and where we want, it also presents challenges for IT — like increasingly fragmented technology tools, distributed teams, and new security challenges. This means admin teams are under more pressure than ever to launch new tools and keep content secure, all while keeping costs at a manageable level.
For more insight on building a leading hybrid workspace, register for BoxWorks 2022 on October 6-7 and check out admin sessions like “Peer perspectives: Taming your tech stack for growth.”