It’s Time to Tackle the Tricky Parts of Hybrid Work

Hybrid work, once a seemingly exotic proposition for the workplace, has rapidly become the norm, and professionals now routinely split their time between home and office. 

Precisely because hybrid work has shown itself to be here to stay rather than a passing fad, it is time to tackle some of the trickier aspects of this new model that might have been placed on the back burner during the early days of the pandemic. By devoting attention to some of these more challenging elements of hybrid work, organizations can move beyond the ad hoc approach they might have initially embraced and enable their professionals to collaborate more effectively and securely. 

Early Email Implementations Have Something To Teach Us

Although Microsoft Teams has proven invaluable for many organizations over the past two years, it is important to take a thoughtful approach to its usage to avoid repeating the mistakes that some organizations made when email was the new communication tool on the block.   

For all its benefits, Teams also has drawbacks:  

• It can fragment your information files because it creates an additional repository for information separate from the official secured and governed document repository, typically a document management system (DMS).   
• In addition to the governance and security challenges, from a user perspective, it is another repository to negotiate and search. 
• From a risk and compliance perspective, it can mean sensitive data is siloed, lost, or left vulnerable to leaks.

When adopting Teams as a new collaboration tool for managing a project, success comes down to several key lessons learned from the experience with email.  

Teams Done Right 

First, organizations should avoid copying content from the DMS into Teams. While Teams plays an extremely important role in facilitating collaboration and communication, it lacks core document management, search, and governance capabilities. Put another way, Teams is not a full-fledged DMS or a place where content is categorized and secured by firm policy, with relevant data points automatically extracted by artificial intelligence to facilitate the easy retrieval and consumption of an organization’s knowledge. 

Fortunately, tight integration between Teams and your DMS solution allows your organization to work more safely as your existing DMS continues to serve as a single source of truth for both content and associated security and governance policy. Integrating the DMS with Teams allows information to flow from the DMS into Teams without making duplicate copies of the content. It also ensures all relevant project information is always categorized and available in the DMS workspaces where it can be searched. All this can be achieved without changing the native user experience in Teams since DMS workspaces are completely accessible from Teams. Additionally, links to DMS documents (rather than the actual documents themselves) are placed in Teams channels. 

Organizations should define and clearly communicate best practices around using Teams from day one. This can include “ground rules” such as hyperlinking to documents in the DMS rather than including them as attached files in Teams (as alluded to above) or directly accessing the DMS workspace via the Teams interface. By setting these expectations, organizations can avoid many of the growing pains and inconsistencies that come with the implementation of email. 

On the security front, a team created to collaborate around a project in the DMS must be secured using the same security policy associated with the DMS project. This allows both security and data governance policies defined centrally in the DMS to be seamlessly applied and kept in sync with the related team in Microsoft Teams. Automating the application of policy makes collaboration in Teams more scalable, reduces costs, and prevents the information from getting into the wrong hands. 

To avoid headaches down the road, it is also a good idea to ensure that Teams content is governed by a policy right from creation to end of life, the same way it is for content and emails and the DMS. Taking this step now will ensure organizations are not caught flatfooted later if Teams content is needed for business continuity or is subject to a discovery request.

See More: 5 Skills Every Team Needs To Support the Hybrid Workplace

Access — With Limits 

Conditional access is another area that organizations need to fully wrap their arms around now that the dust has started to settle on hybrid work arrangements.  

Conditional access is a way of restricting the actions that an end-user can take or the files they can access when logging in from a foreign location or from an unmanaged device — a common scenario in the hybrid era when people are just as likely outside the office as in it. 

Practically speaking, what is the best way to handle this? On the one hand, you do not want to hamper employees’ productivity just because they logged in from their parents’ house in Nebraska or checked their work email from an iPad while on a cruise in the Caribbean. By the same token, securing information and staying vigilant against unauthorized access is non-negotiable. 

The best way for organizations to approach this challenge is to work with their DMS vendor to understand compatibility with conditional access policies and also to investigate data loss prevention (DLP) policies that can detect, alert, and take action to prevent data loss when anomalous behavioral patterns are detected. In so doing, they can help protect their most valuable asset — their data — regardless of where their employees are working from or what device they are using. 

Dotting the I’s, Crossing the T’s 

The move to hybrid work was rapid, but now is the time to pause, take a step back, and dot the proverbial I’s and cross the T’s. A good place for nearly any organization to start is by ensuring they are using best practices with tools like Teams while ensuring that conditional access is striking an appropriate balance between security and productivity.  

Taking the time now to tackle the tricky parts of hybrid work will yield significant dividends moving forward in the form of secure, productive collaboration. By ridding themselves of the nagging feeling that they are either overlooking or putting off tackling some of the more difficult aspects of this new way of working, organizations will gain the confidence that no stone has been left unturned when it comes to making hybrid work a viable model for the long run. 

What best practices have you followed to overcome hybrid work challenges? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’re always eager to hear from you!

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