Ever since I got my first job, I always wanted freedom. I didn’t want to work like a slave for a corporation. Every single time I took a job, I wanted to make sure that I could choose when and where to work. That is within reason of course. I had to go to meetings and they are, for the sake of convenience, scheduled. But flexible workforce is coming and it’s a good thing.

Not everyone can work from home.

I know that some jobs can’t offer flexibility in worktime. I am thinking of the lady at the register at the supermarket who needs to be present when the store is open. The same goes for the men and women working in restaurants. Maybe someday a system will be invented to make that possible for those people as well. We are already seeing self-service check out registers in the supermarkets.

Getting mangers to think that flexible workforce is a good idea.

I have talked to managers about giving their employees the flexibility to choose. Many of them, do not want to let loose, because they do not “trust” their force to be productive. They are afraid that working time well be spend on shopping, going to the park with the kids or household deeds. It’s best if they can keep an eye on their employees.

How to misuse the work from home scheme.

I was once working for a company, where you could work from home, if it made sense. Quickly it didn’t make sense anymore. People started to have fixed work from home days. It could be every Wednesday. At one time, at had to book a meeting with one of my colleagues from another department. My calendar was very booked at that time, so I suggested the only gap that I could find. My colleague told me that it was not possible, because that was her weekly work-from-home day. I got very upset, because, the rule was that you could work from home if it made sense. I argued, that this didn’t made sense to her manager. The meeting was scheduled to another day.

New management, new rules.

Yahoo have always been one the companies that had a flexible workstyle. All of that ended in February 2013. Marissa Mayer gave the order to move all remote workers into a Yahoo location. The reason was that some employees was to anonymous to rest of the organization. They have been working for Yahoo for years, but no one knew them. This meant that the work-from-home workstyle got a bad name in the company. All these people, that was strangers for the rest of the company, had to have a manager. I wonder what happened to them?

Nevertheless, as everything else, things can go out of control. If you have remote workers or if give people flexible hours, you need to manage these people differently and learn to trust that these people are giving their best even though you are not watching them.

You can always become a freelance consultant

Not really. I have offered my services to companies around the world and they want me to come on-site. When I ask why, they just say it gives them more peace of mind. I think it’s more a question about the surveillance of your workforce.

Why is being flexible important?

I don’t think that anyone is in doubt about my opinion about flexible workplace. Over the years, we have seen consumers, more or less, taken over the choice when it comes to devices. I do believe that the next generation that enters the labor market have other expectations to their workplace. If the company isn’t ready, they going to get an issue when it comes to finding people that wants to work for them. In time, they will either surrender to the flexible way of working or they struggle to stay alive.

I do believe that giving people freedom to choose and let them work as they wish will give companies a more productive workforce. I do hope that more mangers and companies will start to look at giving their employees a better workplace. Giving employees a flexible workplace is another way of managing. Clearly something you do not learn when you study for a MBA degree.

The Solution

With Citrix technology, you can offer mobile workstyles to your workforce. With Citrix XenApp, you can deleiver applications and data securely to your users. With Citrix Sharefile, you can easily share files with people inside the organization and people from outside as well.

BYOD

When I talk to enterprise customers, I always ask about the company’s Bring Your Own Device or BYOD policy. Surprisingly, a lot of companies do not have a policy. Even though, this subject has been discussed in a lot of medias and would be one of the next big things. Not many companies have enrolled a BYOD strategy either. When I ask why, they tell me that they do not think it is a good idea.

Bring Your Own Device is when employees bring their own device to do their job. One of the reasons for that is that, people more and more want to choose which device they want to work from. Some do it because they like a specific company logo on their device.

Why is Bring Your Own Device a Good Idea

Why are we even talking about Bring Your Own Device? Employees have to pay for their IT equipment, which they can get for free from the employer. IT doesn’t seem to be too happy about it. It has to do with consumerization and the devices we use in our everyday life. Back in the days Windows was controlling most of both the company and the consumer market. Users was at that time used to Windows devices and that we all worked on laptops provided by IT. At that time, we all saw our laptop as a tool. Something that we used at work. Today, technology is a lot easier to use and is a lot cheaper to get, so we use in our everyday life. We want to transfer those experiences to the way we solve our tasks that we get on the job. The users that are coming out of colleges and universities are a lot more tech savvy and want to have a saying in want they want to use to get their job done.

Less support with a BYOD strategy

Companies that have implemented a BYOD strategy are telling the same story. And all of them are saying that the number of calls to the help desk is reduced afterwards. The reason is that users are more familiar with the device they are using, because they choose one they already know how to use. Another thing is that, if users are a part of the process of choosing their tools, they will do a bigger effort to get things to work. If something from IT doesn’t work, they call help desk from the minute it doesn’t work.

Let’s say that you are now looking at how to solve this. You want to create a Bring Your Own Device strategy. The first question that comes up is “How do I secure company data on an unsecure device?”. Well, you don’t. Keep your data safe and secure in the datacenter and deliver apps and data to the endpoint by using a terminal server solution. I know what you are thinking. You had such a solution in a company that you were working for in the 90’s. And you only used it for remote access. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.

XenApp and XenDesktop to the rescue

Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop can help to offer BYOD in your organization and at the same time not compromise the security on the company network. By running the application and keeping the data inside the datacenter, I will say that your security is a lot better than using fat clients, were you have the data on the devices when you work with it.

I often hear, “I do not want unsecure devices on the company network”. Again, then don’t. Expect the network, where have your clients to be unsecure. Then you don’t have to bother about the clients and the security of those. All you need to focus on is how to secure your data center. With a XenApp and XenDesktop solution, you can give access to apps desktops, without having them interact with to underlying OS of the client.

A BYOD solution is not that far away. XenApp and XenDesktop will give the necessary tools to provide the best Bring Your Own Device solution and at the same time give the security that you need. Citrix made a video about Bring Your Own Device Strategy. You can watch right here.