“We are not the Same People Who Went Home to Work in Early 2020," Microsoft Says

“We are not the same people who went home to work in early 2020,” a new report from Microsoft says. So there could be implications for suppliers in the connectivity and computing industries. 

Most obviously, if Microsoft is right, collaboration “at a distance” will be a permanent reality. That has implications for application usage, bandwidth requirements (volume and location) and the value of “realism” for remote interactions. Business tools able to use artificial reality (and therefore artificial intelligence) to create a more realistic interaction should arrive. 

But much hinges on worker choices about work venues. More than half of presently “remote” workers are considering spending some time in their offices. But more than half of those who presently work partly in the office also are considering shifting to remote work. 

If one assumes there are far more employees presently remote, then the possibility of work venues shifting back to offices is substantial. In that case the “remote computing, apps and connectivity” trends will ameliorate somewhat. 

source: Microsoft 

Business processes will have to be recrafted on the assumption that virtually 100 percent of the workforce will be remote at least some of the time. So “zero trust” security will become common and necessary. 

Facing widespread resistance to “returning to the office full time,” organizations are likely to continue to pursue “hybrid work arrangements” on a permanent basis, which implies a more-distributed communications, computing and applications environment. 

source: Microsoft 

The study of 31,000 people in 31 countries includes data from Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn finds a strong employee resistance to returning to the office full time. If managers are unable to overcome that resistance, all manner of computing and communications patterns will remain more distributed. 

Mobile service providers might find that capacity upgrade requirements in urban areas and along commuting corridors are lessened. Less foot traffic “downtown” will create financial hazards and closures for many small businesses, reducing small business communications and computing demand. 

Bandwidth demand could shift outward to suburban areas, as well, with the potential for a permanent shift of demand from mobile to fixed networks, as workers at home offload to Wi-Fi. 

Overall, cloud-based applications would seem to be in permanently-higher demand as well, if higher amounts of remote work now are a permanent reality.