Is your organization ready for a time when the majority of its employees work beyond the corporate firewall, most or even all of the time? That’s the question recently posed to IT executives in a report by T.J. Keitt, senior analyst at industry watcher Forrester Research. And it demands an urgent response.

Information workers, he says, are moving more swiftly in this direction than many business leaders are ready to acknowledge. In a survey of over 5,000 North American and European business technology users conducted earlier this year, Forrester found that two-thirds (66%) already work remotely at different points during the working month — whether at home, in a hotel room or airport lounge, at a client’s premises or in a service office, while commuting or in any number of other public places.

“If business leaders and their counterparts in IT are to get in front of this trend, they have to understand their mobile and remote workforce,” says Keitt. “What they need to ask is: Who is shifting work between the office and other locations? What technology are they using to do so? Do they believe that the company is doing a good job of providing them with the policies and technology to work this way?”

And if senior managers are unable to answer such questions, Keitt warns, they will struggle in the face of what is fast becoming an unstoppable trend — the shift from the “workplace” to the “workspace” — a trend that has “profound implications for everything from the location and design of offices, to IT’s provisioning of technology, to how business leaders marshal expertise.”

Enabling flexible working

The shift has been underway for the best part of two decades, but it is only now that the full set of enablers has fallen into place: the secure availability of corporate applications via the Internet, an array of collaboration tools and a vast number of (user- or corporate-purchased) mobile devices. Many of those capabilities have emerged from the world of consumer rather than corporate technology and are already part of the DNA of a new generation that has different expectations of how work should be structured.

“The viewpoint of the generation coming into the workforce is that work isn’t somewhere you go, it is something you do; that location should be irrelevant,” says Craig Baty, chief technology officer for Australia and New Zealand at global ICT company Fujitsu.

“The consumerization of IT is driving a major part of what businesses need to provide to their workforce,” he adds. “We’re moving into a human-centric era of computing where a combination of network, cloud, devices and even sensors provide access to corporate applications and data from flexible work environments, 24/7 — indeed, people now expect that. The whole area of mobility and end-user computing is putting a lot of pressure on CIOs.”

Successfully responding to those pressures, though, can have great benefits for employees and employers alike. Study after study confirms that employees who have the option to telework are not only more satisfied in their jobs, they’re more productive, too. For example:

• US electronics retailer Best Buy claims that average productivity increased 35% through flexible work programs

• Dow Chemicals puts the productivity gain at around 33%

• Telecoms company BT says its flexible workers are 20% more productive than their office-based colleagues

• Within American Express’s customer sales and service teams, teleworkers handle 26% more calls and produce 43% more business than their office-based counterparts.

In all these cases, contributing factors are: fewer interruptions, more effective time management and a greater feeling of work/life balance despite employees working, on average, longer hours.

Anywhere but the office

For other employees, the shift to a more virtual style of working is dictated by the amount of business travel that their job demands. Whether they are in an airport departure lounge, a conference center or a hotel room, “work has become more a state of being than a place and time for many people,” says Kim Woodward, vice president of corporate marketing at desktop virtualization specialist Citrix Systems.

Citrix claims to have coined the term “workshifting” to describe the growing trend of working from anywhere other than a traditional office through the use of web-based technology.

But enabling a virtual workforce can involve considerable risk. In her 2009 book, Leading the Virtual Workforce: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations in the 21st Century, Karen Sobel Lojeski, a professor in the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University in the US, argues that it requires a whole new leadership model.

“The problem is that while the way we work has changed, the way leaders lead those workforces has not,” she explains. Those leaders are required to deal with issues arising from “virtual distance,” a combination of physical separation, technology mediation and disconnected work relationships.

Fortunately, there is much IT leaders can do to mitigate against any danger — but only if they have the right technology strategy in place to nurture and support the virtual workforce, rather than cramp its flexibility and productivity.

The first priority, according to Keitt of Forrester Research, is deciding how to develop the corporate IT infrastructure in line with the workshifting trend. “If portions of the workforce are mobile and/or remote, IT has to decide how to provide these groups with remote access to applications and information,” he says. That involves identifying employees who are leaving the confines of the office, as well as the tools, applications and types of connections they require when they do.

“For example, an employee spending the bulk of their time on a client site may not be able to use a VPN [virtual private network] client to access applications, meaning that IT should provide these as a service through an employee portal,” he says.

Supporting users’ own devices

Another important priority is evaluating the devices that IT should (or shouldn’t) support. At many companies this is highly problematic, as decisions are now being forced upon them by employees increasingly adamant about making their own choices regarding devices, with or without the IT department’s approval.

For example, in a 2010 survey of more than 500 IT managers across the US, Germany, Japan, China and India, conducted by networking technology company Cisco Systems, 41% of respondents confirmed that employees regularly access the corporate network using unsupported devices.

At the same time, it seems that many in IT are resigned to the trend: a November 2010 poll of attendees at market research company Gartner’s annual symposium revealed that they expect one in five mobile devices used for business purposes to be employee-owned by 2012.

But whether such devices are company-owned or employee-owned, “if they are used on the organization’s network to access the organization’s assets, then that organization has a responsibility to measure, check and provide safeguards,” say Clive Longbottom and Bob Tarzey, analysts at IT market research company Quocirca, in a recent report.

The goal, however, is not only to secure data — although this is clearly critical — but also to secure the best value for the lowest overall cost to the organization.

Employees buying their own devices might bring potential upfront savings for their employers, Longbottom and Tarzey point out, but there may be unexpected consequences in the form of higher costs elsewhere.

For example, what network tariffs are being used? What is the impact on software and support? Are some people unable to function properly because their choices are incompatible in some way with their role, with the technology choices of their colleagues or with other technologies being used by the business?

Another important consideration for the IT department is planning content and collaboration strategies that will keep workers connected. That was a key issue for Medibank Health Solutions, one of Australia’s largest providers of private health insurance.

Staying connected

The company operates a “work at home” model for its call center, and the majority of the two million calls it receives annually are handled by the 85% of its call-center staff that work from home.

“Our staff loved the idea of working from home and having the flexibility to work a variety of rostered shifts that suited their own personal situation,” says Medibank’s IT manager, Dave Buckmaster.

“However, we noted early on that this particular style of employment wasn’t for everyone. Despite all of our [call center] staff being registered nurses and clinicians, this type of work would sometimes be emotionally trying — for example, if a staff member was working through a call with a patient who was distressed.”

Employees needed a better support network to handle situations like these. That has been addressed, says Buckmaster, by implementing the web-based collaboration platform GoToMeeting from Citrix Online to monitor staff in real-time and provide them with induction and training sessions.

High priorities

Finally, IT leaders will need to anticipate the extent to which facilities costs will change. With fewer workers coming into the office full time, the IT organization has the opportunity to rethink how office-based technology is allocated, says Reitt of Forrester Research.

In fact, right across the board, it’s clear that more mature thinking — and certainly more action — is needed on the issue of supporting the virtual workforce. In a recent survey of 500 business leaders in multinational companies, conducted by telco Vodafone, the majority (88%) of respondents say that the implementation of mobile, flexible working is a medium or high strategic priority.

But despite mounting pressure to go in that direction from employees, customers and competitors (more than half of those surveyed, for example, said that their employees wanted the option of flexible working), only 41% have so far implemented such initiatives.

However, for Nicholas McQuire, research director at analyst firm IDC, there is no doubt as to the future direction of flexible working, as the advantages become clearer to business leaders.

“Although there are some perceived obstacles, the benefits around cost reduction, enhanced productivity, more robust business continuity plans and improved sustainability and compliance are helping organizations to overcome any doubts and offer employees greater flexibility in terms of where they choose to work,” he says.

And that applies to the tools they work with too. Says Fujitsu’s Craig Baty: “We’re only seeing the beginning of the applications available that can support flexible working. Many will be sourced from the [public] cloud rather than from your corporate network — apps for smartphones and tablets that make your working life a lot easier.”

Or, to put it another way, the shift from workplace to workspace is now unstoppable and too transformational for CIOs to ignore.

Case Study: How a leading global law firm is embracing consumer IT to support workforce mobility.