After more than a year of working from home, employees of financial services firm Northwestern Mutual began returning to the office in mid-June. The reopening adopted a hybrid work model, which was voluntary for employees, and had previously been piloted with only a portion of staff.

Adapting to the challenges and opportunities of employees returning to the office in a flexible model will take time. Northwestern Mutual's Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Neal Sample, said the company will learn from practice in the coming months. But problems were already apparent in the first week of the reopening.

Sample said, "We did see a large number of employees calling the call center, seeking help with system reactivation and re-adaptation."

Data confirms that the hybrid work environment will test most IT managers in the coming months. A survey by The Conference Board of 3,600 U.S. employees showed that although only 12% of employees had returned to the workplace in June, 43% expected to be back in the office by the end of September.

As companies operate with both remote and on-site work, IT systems must be able to flexibly respond to employee movement, which tests IT departments.

But in the long term, a more complex new issue emerges: companies need to deploy software, hardware, and cloud tools to achieve digital parity for employees, ensuring the same experience regardless of location.

Sample said, "In some cases, there is a need for duplicate or additional devices, which requires us to spend more time solving. We had what we called a higher-quality home office experience; now bringing devices back to the office, the home office experience may become less efficient, and vice versa."

IT challenges in the hybrid work era

Employees returning to the office are not the same as when they began working from home in March 2020.

In adapting to round-the-clock remote work, employees' digital skills have improved. According to data from Gartner, 18% of employees now consider themselves digital technology experts, and more than half use personal applications or web services for collaboration.

Employees using their own tools may increase shadow IT risks and reduce operational visibility, while daily workloads in a flexible model are unpredictable. Mark Gaffan, CEO of Hysolate, said that as the hybrid work technology landscape evolves, IT departments face difficulties in planning.

"The ratio of employees in the office versus remote is a dynamic number, and you need to handle both extremes almost simultaneously," Gaffan said.

"No one has really implemented hybrid work on a large scale yet. Anything new requires testing and experimentation, and companies are going through their own learning curves."

— Bhushan Sethi, Joint Global Leader of People & Organization at PwC

As employees gradually return to central workplaces, IT teams face greater difficulty in maintaining systems while managing more tools and applications. Before the pandemic, the IT department's toolbox included collaboration software, productivity tools, and other enterprise applications; now, they also need to run new platforms such as workspace scheduling and digital onboarding.

To support hybrid work, 72% of executives plan to increase investment in virtual collaboration tools, and another 70% plan to strengthen IT infrastructure to ensure virtual connectivity, according to a PwC survey. Enhanced conference room technology and hospitality-style office applications are also key investment areas.

Bhushan Sethi, Joint Global Leader of People & Organization at PwC, said, "IT departments must be able to provide all the infrastructure needed to support both virtual and office work."

Technical support teams need to ensure offices are equipped with high-quality screens so employees can connect with clients or colleagues with 'one click'.

At the same time, IT departments also need to address network bandwidth issues at company headquarters and troubleshoot employees' home network connections, as companies increasingly rely on video-intensive collaboration tools.

Leon Gilbert, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Workplace Services at Unisys, said, "When we use collaboration platforms like Zoom or Teams, how do companies consider office bandwidth? That bandwidth may never have been designed for 100 people on video conferences simultaneously."

Cybersecurity issues in hybrid work also add extra obstacles. Sample noted that when employees 'switch from a controlled corporate network to a less controlled network' and back, risks increase further.

Workplaces will remain targets for malicious attackers. Mimecast data shows that threats rose 48% between March 2020 and February 2021. The company said there is a 95% likelihood that threat actors will continue to target workplaces in the future, and both remote and returning employees could be targets.

Achieving digital parity

The picture of the modern enterprise depicts a mobile workforce, with people moving in and out of the office as the week progresses.

Some companies have already adjusted. For example, Dropbox transformed traditional offices into collaboration studios; Calendly canceled its headquarters and went fully remote; Pinterest abandoned its planned San Francisco office hub.

Northwestern Mutual, on the other hand, is upgrading existing spaces with technology, combining software and hardware to balance the workplace experience, Sample said.

"What we're really focused on is: how do we make the hybrid experience at least as good as 'everyone in the conference room' or 'everyone remote'?" Sample said.

The company equipped conference rooms with cameras that can dynamically focus on speakers via voice commands and introduced digital whiteboard tools—an important part of the initial pandemic response.

Gilbert said companies also need to ensure employees have digital parity and experience parity. Digital parity means employees have equal access to the tools needed for work, while experience parity requires that employees get a consistent experience when using these tools, regardless of location.

If responding to the pandemic was tough for CIOs, the new phase of hybrid work 'may be even more challenging,' said Meera Rajavel, CIO of Citrix.

"When everyone was remote, in a way, the playing field was level," Rajavel said. But in a hybrid model, if digital experiences don't match, unconscious bias or inequality can creep in.

In the future workplace, the experience should be seamless regardless of location.

"Today, I can join a team conference call with just one click," Rajavel said. "When I walk into a conference room, I want the same: with one click, the room lights up."

With insights into business, operations, and technology, companies will rely on IT departments' input to find the ideal framework for hybrid work. But perhaps reassuringly, this is uncharted territory.

"No one has really implemented hybrid work on a large scale yet," Sethi said. "Anything new requires testing and experimentation, and companies are going through their own learning curves."

If it fails, what are the risks? Besides declining productivity and customer experience, companies may also lose the talent war to competitors.

Rajavel said, "If technology leaders don't embrace this way of working and don't help companies operate in this model, we will lose talent in this talent war."