Balancing employees’ desire for more flexibility³ with organisations’ need for in-office attendance, return-to-office mandates have changed — and will continue to change — from a five-day in-office setup to one that only requires employees to go to the office two or three times a week.

As working styles evolve, organisations must be able to provide their employees with great hybrid work experience — something that they can easily accomplish with emerging technologies.⁴

Hybrid work’s bevy of benefits can’t be overstated. For one, it increases employee productivity and efficiency. A recent study from the University of Birmingham that surveyed managers found that working from home improves employee concentration (51.8%), increases productivity (59.5%), and improves motivation (62.8%).⁵

Hybrid and remote work can improve work-life balance by lessening commuting time and stress levels.⁶ Because organisations are not confined to recruiting within their countries, they’re also able to gain access to a global pool of talent and expand the number of their employees from various cultural backgrounds with different specialised skills.⁷

Hybrid work doesn’t come without its own set of challenges, including difficulty maintaining employee engagement and collaboration.⁸

Because hybrid and remote employees spend less or no time in the office, their work machines are not protected by the more secure and monitored office IT environment. This exposes them to cyberattacks and risks, including phishing, network threats, and virtual private network (VPN) vulnerabilities.⁹

Aside from security challenges, hybrid employees also run into technological difficulties. They find that they have less access to company resources and equipment¹⁰ and that their work systems don’t function as well as they would in the office environment.¹¹

To counter hybrid and remote work challenges and empower employees to work more efficiently, organisations can leverage advanced technologies such as SD-WAN.

SD-WAN, a technology that uses software-defined networking concepts to distribute traffic across a wide area network, can be used to connect distributed offices to data centers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based applications.¹²

Organisations can also leverage SD-WAN technology to optimise bandwidth utilisation and steer network traffic to prioritise business-critical services and applications. SD-WAN also provides real-time network performance monitoring, which allows companies to immediately spot and remediate network issues.¹³ These can help facilitate bolstered employee productivity and efficiency, which ultimately lead to operational and financial advantages.

Aside from increased flexibility and performance, SD-WAN also improves an organisation’s overall cybersecurity posture by ensuring the secure transfer of data across different locations. This hinders cybercriminals from accessing critical company data and prevents costly data breaches from occurring.¹⁴

Organisations need to empower their growing hybrid workforce via reliable and cost-effective SD-WAN solutions that simplify network deployment and management.

Singtel SD-WAN supports organisations’ cloud, security, and networking needs, enabling companies to reduce costs, stay ahead of security threats, and improve speed to market. Singtel SD-WAN is part of the Singtel CUBΣ portfolio, a unified suite of network solutions and services designed to make enterprise networking easier to connect, manage, monitor, and expand globally.