What if hybrid working overburdens your IT staff?

Consulting agency Deloitte has calculated that people born in the 80s and 90s represent close to 75% of today’s labour market (Big demands and high expectations. The Deloitte Millennial Survey. Deloitte, 2014). This generation has noticeably different career expectations from its predecessors and also makes higher demands of employers.

Hybrid working as a priority

Right at the top of the millennials’ list is flexibility, specifically hybrid working. They like the combination of a fixed PC at the office and a mobile device they can use to work from home or another location. A survey conducted by consulting agency Gartner in 2020 has shown that nine in ten employees prefer to work remotely, either part- or full-time (Improving Employee Engagement Survey, Gartner, 2020). Also, they no longer insist on fixed office hours but instead want to work at the times that best suit them.

In a more recent Gartner study (Future of Work Reinvented, Gartner, 2021), well over half of respondents clearly indicated that the possibility of flexible working is one of the key ingredients in their decision to stay with an employer or not. In other words, flexibility is important when it comes to hiring new talent and keeping existing staff happy.

Impact of flexibility

In addition to flexibility in working hours and location, employers are advised to give their employees more freedom when it comes to the devices they work with. Every employee has a preference for a specific brand or operating system. Taking this into account benefits employee satisfaction and productivity in general.

But there is a downside to leaving your employees free to decide when, where and on which device they work. In practical terms, hybrid working makes the management and protection of company devices much more complex. Employees come and go, devices have to be repaired or sometimes need to be replaced unexpectedly... Keeping an overview of which devices contain which corporate information is not straightforward. Moreover, flexible working hours require generous availability of your IT helpdesk to give employees quick access to support, even outside office hours. The result? An overburdened IT department and costs that skyrocket almost unnoticed.

Less pressure on your IT department

For companies that are confronted with the downside of hybrid working, we’ve created the Hardware Comfort solution. With Hardware Comfort, we manage the entire life cycle of your devices, from purchase and installation to repairs and recycling.

Hardware Comfort offers your employees the flexibility they desire without overburdening your IT department. Your IT specialists can focus on those areas where they provide the greatest added value, so you can make optimum use of their expertise while hybrid working genuinely boosts productivity.