How Do You Plan to Keep Your Users Productive?
A new report has been published by McKinsey, exactly one year after the start of the COVID19 crisis, examining current remote work in 9 countries, and what they expect to see in upcoming months and years. The report is titled: What’s next for remote work: An analysis of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries, and can be viewed in its entirety here.
The report offers some interesting findings regarding remote work. It notes that the finance, management, professional services, and information sectors are the industries most likely to continue with at least partial remote work, at least in the United States.
McKinsey suggests that executives anticipate operating their businesses with a hybrid model of some sort, with employees working remotely and from an office during the work week. JPMorgan already has a plan for its 60,950 employees to work from home one or two weeks a month or two days a week, depending on the line of business.
The potential for long term remote work is vastly different between more advanced economies and emerging economies. In more advanced economies, with better internet connectivity and infrastructure, remote work is expected to be a part of companies’ long term planning, including a reduction of office space and more technologies deployed to enable successful remote work.
This is especially applicable in the finance and insurance industries, as well as other computer based professions like market research, where workers can work from home with no productivity loss, i.e. there are minimal impediments to them getting their jobs done remotely.
How Does Remote Work Affect Productivity?
Is remote work good for productivity? Some 41 percent of employees who responded to a McKinsey consumer survey in May said they were more productive working remotely than in the office, with the number of people saying they worked more productively increasing to 45 percent from April to May. With nine months of experience under their belts, more employers are seeing increased productivity from their remote workers.
The Industries Most Well Suited To Work From Home Also Face The Biggest Security Risks
Companies in the financial and insurance fields have access to huge amounts of personal data, and sensitive corporate assets. While workers may be moving to remote work models, the IT and Security management in these companies need to guarantee that these sensitive assets cannot be exposed to security risks. This may mean setting up different desktop security solutions to keep data secure, and these solutions can often affect worker productivity, with different websites, applications or devices like USBs being blocked or inaccessible.
Managing the IT infrastructure for a distributed team? Download our IT Checklist to help prepare you for productive long term work from home without security issues.
How Can IT Managers Set Their Teams up for Secure, Productive Online Work?
IT managers in financial and insurance companies have faced many unique challenges in the last 12 months. As remote work looks to become a permanent feature, they have to invest in long-term technology solutions that help their teams get their jobs done, without impacting on security. These solutions must be cost efficient, secure and enable productivity for all employees, including those who continue to work remotely.
With workers working remotely, “mixed usage” on user devices is inevitable, even on corporate devices. This can either result in users opening up their companies to malware and other security risks, or IT severely restricting web browsing or different applications, reducing productivity.
Hysolate’s innovative Workspace Isolation solution offers a unique tool for IT Managers who are managing distributed teams, especially in data sensitive industries like finance and insurance.
With Hysolate, users get two fully separated virtualized environments, to keep their risky everyday work activities isolated from corporate data. IT admins have full control over what actions take place within Workspace, while users are unhindered by traditional security solutions that block necessary websites and communication applications.
Benefits of Hysolate for Financial and Insurance Companies
- Financial and Insurance teams are expected to continue some form of remote or hybrid work through 2021. Hysolate’s isolated desktop solution enables your team to work productively and securely, wherever they are.
- Hysolate isolates your corporate data from risky activities, reducing concerns about data security, while your team is doing their work.
- Hysolate can be easily deployed and scaled across teams, with admins having full control over Workspace settings. This mitigates risk from endpoint attacks, and makes compliance easier.
- As financial and insurance teams have moved to hybrid work models, communication tools like Zoom and Slack have become key. Hysolate allows your team to access riskier websites, use USBs, communication applications and other productivity tools, all while your corporate data stays safe and “isolated”.
Want to find out more? Request a demo here.
