COVID, remote work, and the sudden maturity of the digital workplace
The pandemic accomplished in a few months what corporate IT strategies had failed to do in years. What changed in the digital infrastructure of companies - and what will stick.
In February 2020, in most of the companies I worked with, remote work was the exception, not the norm. In some it was allowed for specific roles, in some it was formally banned, in some it existed in practice but without any infrastructure to support it.
Three months later that picture had changed entirely. Not because new technology appeared - everything needed was already available. It changed because it had to.
That is, I think, the main observation: the speed of digital transformation is determined not by the maturity of the technology, but by the pressure of circumstances.
What companies did quickly
Between March and April, most organisations solved several problems that had previously seemed hard:
- deployed corporate VPN or secure remote access to internal systems;
- moved communication to messengers and video calls;
- organised remote onboarding procedures for new employees;
- shifted part of their document workflows into digital form.
This is not a revolution. But these were steps that many companies had been planning for years.
Worth noting: all of this came with costs - security compromised in favour of speed, technical debt from fast decisions, uneven quality between teams. But it got done.
What emerged as a real constraint
Some things turned out to be not just "inconvenient in remote mode" - they exposed structural problems that had been less visible before.
Paper-based document workflows. Companies with formally mandatory paper processes were trapped. Signing, approving, archiving - all of it required physical presence. Where electronic signatures had been adopted, it was not a problem.
Processes dependent on physical presence. Processes that existed formally in written procedures but actually worked through conversations by the coffee machine or a nod across the open-plan floor - turned out to be non-functional. That is a useful diagnostic.
Systems not designed for distributed access. Some internal systems simply were not reachable from outside. Not because that was a deliberate security design, but because nobody had thought about this scenario.
What will stick
Some changes will likely become permanent - not because companies decided to keep them, but because people have adapted and reverting would take active effort.
Hybrid work formats, video calls as the standard meeting tool, asynchronous communication through messengers - all of this will probably remain the norm. Not everywhere and not for all roles, but as a baseline infrastructure expectation.
This creates new requirements for IT infrastructure: not "how to support remote work in a crisis", but "how to design the workplace for a normal state in which some people are always not in the office".
Questions for an owner or director
If you are now thinking about what conclusions to draw from these nine months:
- Which processes in your company turned out to be fundamentally incompatible with remote work - and should they be rethought?
- Which technical decisions made in March now carry risks you plan to address?
- How have your employees' expectations about work flexibility changed - and how are you responding to that?
The digital workplace grew up unplanned. Now - while the context is still fresh - is a good moment to think clearly about where to go from here.