Hybrid Work User Types

So, we are all now familiar with the term hybrid workforce – a model that supports people working in a physical office, from home or on the move.

This does however mean businesses now need to build technology ecosystems, that can promote and support a productive, collaborative, secure, reliable, and personal employee experience with the goal of creating a place, where people are happy to return to day-after-day!

Technology for Hybrid Workers

Effective business tools are an essential part of the new hybrid workforce. The sample list of tools below consolidates everything from phone systems to file sharing, video conferencing, and real-time messaging into a central platform.

Communication and collaboration software

The ability to communicate through the latest communication tools, such as Microsoft Teams ensures employees don’t miss the 1:1 communication provided by an in-office setting.

Microsoft Teams helps people to meet, chat, call and collaborate, all through single secure platform.

Project Management Tools

Real-time access to tasks and projects is key when people work from various locations.

Choose a project management system whereby all employees are keenly aware of what is expected of them—deliverables, due dates, and priority tasks—and can track the progress of such events

Hardware that maximises productivity

A hybrid workforce offers the benefits of increased productivity – but only when employees are provided with the right tools.

Hybrid Worker Personas

These tools can help employees be more productive by designating certain platforms and channels for specific types of communication and collaboration. An investment in the right hardware and software tools optimises workflow, communications, efficiency, and ultimately enables better decisions for the long term.

To achieve this, user personas need to be created within your organisation, which typically would include the below 4 categorisations -

• Exec Team
• Information Worker
• Frontline Worker
• Temporary Worker

So, when we say to look at this from a user persona perspective, what do we mean? Let’s start with what each user persona role is.

Exec Team Worker

 Exec Teams workers tend to be -

• Financial Directors
• Legislative Staff
• Principles
• School Admins
• Professors

A modern Exec Team go wherever needed, to make decisions and solve problems.  Versatile in their work style, they use more communication tools than any other persona.

Exec’s generally have a requirement to work on their own with lots of travel, their own pick of devices and an expectation of a perfect service, always. This means the devices they use needs to be extremely portable and highly secure.

Information Workers

These workers include -

• Managers
• Consultants
• Office Workers

A new category of information worker is emerging. Cloud Information Workers, who are like traditional knowledge workers, but spend most of their time on cloud-based apps & services, and not on traditional desktop applications.

Cloud Information Workers are generally spilt into two specific personas -

Knowledge & task workers

Knowledge and Task workers have a wide variety of tasks to complete, sometimes these are not easy to quantify, as well as needing to be flexible in locations and devices. There may be quite a few different types of knowledge or task workers within the organisation, who have very different requirements. 

These workers will require a cohesive experience across any device, be it Mac, Android, IOS, or Windows, meaning choice for users. It also provides the ability to be flexible in reacting to requirements which traditionally may have been project related. A desktop (virtual or physical) or laptop, headset and phone are usually the tools of choice, however, empowering task workers with cloud toolsets can help them be more productive.

Power workers

Power workers normally require either high-end compute or graphics and traditionally had powerful workstation(s) for their workloads. This may be one category which may not change hardware for their main PC, however, giving them the flexibility to work from anywhere using a high-power or graphics enabled VDI in the cloud, and provisioning this in minutes rather than weeks, can promote better productivity in this type of worker.

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Frontline Workers

These workers include –

• retail associate
• factory line worker
• customer service representative
• first-responders
• housekeeping staff
• call-center team
• support technician
• field service worker
• front desk/registration staff

Frontline workers continue to be the backbone of hybrid operations for all major industries, and we see specific needs for different user personas within this category.

For front line workers, we recommend secure mobile/highly portable devices with app protection policies and Information Protection to protect corporate data, provided with access to the corporate line of business apps, give access to a virtual environment connected via an Edge OS or thin client for when they need to access certain applications.

Temporary Workers

These workers include –

• Leave of absence cover worker
• Seasonal worker
• Short-term cover worker
• Gap worker

We are seeing an emergence in temporary, elastic workforces.  These are often contract-based workers that have rich computing needs that will rapidly scale up and down based on the work that needs to be done. 

So, to summarise, the technology you use today is a critical success factor for enabling a hybrid Workforce.

However, choosing the right devices, accessories and software isn’t particularly easy, especially given how many options there are in the market today – so with this in mind, Chess have developed a way of simplifying this and making it easier to make the most of your technology budget, all via an online devise solutions platform!

In partnership with some of the industry’s leading vendors, such as Microsoft, HP, Lenovo, DELL and numerous leading peripheral partners, we can help you to build specific bundles that are aligned to your user personas, creating a standardised fleet of devices and at the same time, giving users choice of the devices and equipment they use.

Within the platform, you can purchase by selecting a buy now option, should you wish to use hard cash or alternately you can also select a Fair Market Value leasing option, should cash be king in your business right now.