Steve Marsh is the Founder and Chairman of Smarsh, a leader in the enterprise information archiving industry.
getty
During the pandemic, many professionals have come to enjoy some of the benefits of telecommuting, whether it’s not having to endure traffic, being more productive or having the ability to work from wherever they want. At the same time, recent studies make it clear that few workers crave a permanent all-virtual work experience.
As it turns out, many business leaders feel the same way. Tech behemoths Microsoft and Facebook have reopened office space, while Amazon continues to spend billions on expanding its physical real estate footprint.
Meanwhile, many banks and wealth management firms are making similar plans. Big names like JPMorgan, Stifel and Wells Fargo have said employees should make plans to return to the office as early as this summer.
During the first-quarter earnings season, the CEOs of these firms echoed the same theme: In-person interaction boosts innovation, cultivates more teamwork and improves training programs.
Still, we’ve likely seen the last of the Monday-through-Friday in-office work week. In its place, expect to see a future defined by extreme flexibility — whereby the office could be bustling on Monday, deserted on Tuesday and then busy again on Wednesday.
With that in mind, these are some of the things businesses in highly regulated industries will have to think about going forward:
Choosing the best collaboration tools and platforms is just the start.
While much of the success of the extreme flexibility approach will depend on which workstream collaboration technology a firm chooses, the other consideration is how they will capture, retain and monitor data from these platforms for compliance, risk and e-discovery purposes.
Not enough leaders are thinking about these responsibilities — even as regulators have signaled that supervising these channels is essential. According to our company’s research, of the 83% of financial firms that allow collaboration tools, only 22% have established retention and oversight programs to cover them.
This gap presents a significant risk for firms — and the threat will only become more intense as the extreme flexibility model takes hold and these tools and platforms proliferate further.
Bad behavior won’t go away.
Unfortunately, workplace harassment will continue to occur even after many businesses segue into a hybrid model. In fact, if you’ve ever spent time on social media, you know that you could easily make the argument that such behavior will become more of a problem.
Firms, therefore, must be able to monitor not only what is said on their digital channels but how it’s said. In conversations involving employees, context is important. But when you’re dealing with vast volumes of data from multiple sources, coming to terms with that often requires sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.
Investments in the proper monitoring technology today will enable companies to protect their cultures better and provide critical shields against the human and financial risks associated with leaving this kind of behavior unchecked.
Be prepared to monitor everything.
Workers will — either intentionally or by mistake — use unauthorized channels, even if firms issue best practices and produce a list of approved digital platforms. It could be that the temptation to use the latest tool is too difficult to resist or that clients or business partners use one that is unapproved (and even if firms are confident that employees aren’t using unapproved platforms, they still have a duty to prove it).
Whatever the case, it’s why limiting use will never be a practical strategy in today’s emerging environment. Having a line of sight into all channels — including ones that seem to explode in popularity overnight — will help firms stay one step ahead of regulatory compliance headaches.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, business leaders must understand that managing and supervising employees in a remote/hybrid environment will get exponentially more difficult as time goes on.
Indeed, when an entire staff is working under one roof, it’s somewhat easy to get a sense of who everyone is, how they interact with customers and peers and what activities they engage in. But the minute they retreat to their own environments, far from any physical oversight, it’s easier to lose sight of these things.
Coming to terms with this is a crucial part of recognizing the fallout from extreme flexibility — a reality in which having the right technology to gather data points to help paint the picture of an employee’s conduct will become the norm for many industries.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
