Distance working and learning: The new normal

In a recent article on The Verge, Microsoft is cited as stating that the coronavirus will change how we work and learn forever. We wouldn’t disagree. Social-distancing strategies have accelerated an already-growing trend, and we don’t know when these practices might end. 

Most companies that can perform “as normal” are doing everything they can to implement strategies and technologies to enable seamless business as usual. Echoing our thoughts from previous weeks, Microsoft shared some early insight in a remote-work trend report, for example: 

• Microsoft Teams use jumped from 32 million daily active users to 44 million in just one week.
• New daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in a single day (a 200% increase from previous month)
• Video is bigger than ever, and remote work is making video more popular 
• Productivity app, Slack, has also hit record user numbers

Are all systems go?

This kind of growth comes with the inevitable challenge of ramping up the capacity of must-have tools. Microsoft, Google, Slack, Zoom and a host of other remote tools and apps have faced outages and performance issues as the number of users has spiked. Other companies report scalability, offsite accessibility and performance challenges with internal, sometimes proprietary and legacy, tools. Somehow all of these will have to work together - and work at scale - to keep work flowing.

While it’s reassuring that the technology and communication tools exist to support remote work and learning, bigger questions arise when considering how you can implement these work-related challenges sustainably:

• Is the performance of internal systems and apps up to par for employees working off-site/from home?
• Can employees easily get access to internal systems, apps and tools? 
• Can these internal apps and tools scale up? 
  
  

As internal meetings and town halls, external customer/prospect consultations and even lecture halls/classrooms move online, all manner of systems will be taxed by new levels of demand. How can you ensure uptime, availability and scalability to give your teams what they need to perform?