The future of work is no longer an abstract concept: what once seemed a distant prospect has abruptly turned into an everyday reality for many businesses, courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. With most employees now forced to carry out their jobs at home amid locked-down cities, companies across all industries are starting a new chapter – one called 'remote working for everyone'.
More prosaically, the imperative to switch entire workforces of organizations small and large to working from home, sometimes in a matter of days, has given some employees endless to-do lists and rather long hours. CIOs and their teams, who are responsible for leading their company's technology strategy, have been having a busy few weeks.
The CIO's role right now consists of making sure the technology architecture of their organization enables employees to keep working productively, even from their homes. In the current context, this has often meant setting up entire systems for remote working, even before a full lock-down made it impossible for colleagues to come into the office and ask the IT department for help with unforeseen issues.
In the UK, for instance, Leeds City Council got 11,500 office-based employees ready to work from home in the course of a weekend. The organization's digital services team had to get 7,000 laptops ready-to-go in just three days, before the full impact of the spread of COVID-19 began to hit home.
SEE: Working from home: Success tips for telecommuters (free PDF)
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