When your workplace is your endpoint, performance is everything. That’s what Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Senior Analyst at Constellation Research, declared during his keynote session at this summer’s Work From Anywhere Conference. Indeed, that’s why it wasn’t surprising to find out that 98% of employees report that endpoint performance is important to their ability to work. But it was completely unnerving to find out that slow-running devices are a top 3 cause of reduced productivity when working remotely.
Resilient endpoints are the foundation of the modern employee experience
Although remote work clearly has had its problems in 2020, it points to the future and, according to Dion, presents an historic opportunity to reshape the employee experience through endpoint management. To change work for the better, we need to rethink how we support employees and their devices anywhere. This shouldn’t sound dauting because employees aren’t crying out for radical digital transformation. On the contrary, they’re asking for a basic necessity. Employees want good, dependable devices that they can rely on to work as fast as they want to.
So, if organizations continue to rely on office-centric technology stacks to support employees with the misplaced understanding that there will be a return to normalcy, they risk bypassing this opportunity altogether, damaging their competitive positioning and steering a decline in employee engagement.
The future of endpoint management relies on smart IT monitoring
If we take the above as gospel—that we can’t deliver great employee experiences without a better endpoint management infrastructure—we’re presented with a tangible objective. IT must optimize their strategy to deliver better endpoint quality and performance. How do you do it? By adopting smart IT monitoring based on three principles:
- Be proactive: As soon as an employee has to raise a device performance issues, their experience has already been compromised. One endpoint issue impacts individual productivity and could also cause a whole team to grind to a halt. With today’s technology capabilities, there’s no reason why IT shouldn’t know what issue a user is experiencing before even the user does and be able to proactively fix it through automated responses.
- Make the endpoint personal: We know that employees’ relationship with technology is a very personal experience. Remote workers in particular are completely dependent on their devices to provide any value to the organization, effectively making the device an extension of themselves. IT must enable this personalization to flourish by configuring endpoints to be as flexible for the employee as possible while simultaneously ensuring security measures are robust.
- Provide contextual insights: Visibility is everything, especially if you want to make good decisions. IT must know what is happening on all devices at any given moment, especially when they are remote. These contextual insights are vital for performing root cause analysis and enabling proactive remediation to ensure you’re really fixing the problem at hand.
A new vision for endpoint management
These principles culminate in a new vision for endpoint management that organically forces monitoring into the limelight. Critically, when endpoint issues are raised, the default should be that most responses and fixes are automated to limit disruption. All the while, IT must be leveraging digital experience monitoring to drive down the number of incident escalations, ensuring consistent and high-quality IT support and experiences.
Keep looking forward
If IT leaders take away only one thing from Dion’s keynote, it should be this: Organizations willing to create the healthiest, safest, and most effective remote digital employee experience in history will reap vast rewards. There’s no going back. And why would you? The future feels tantalizingly optimistic if we play our cards right.
If you missed Dion’s keynote at WFA Conference, you can watch it on-demand here.
