Lockdown has helped open the eyes of business leaders to the potential of remote working; understanding how working from home — or a different location — can offer opportunities for employees, such as encountering fewer disruptions, allowing them to focus on substantive work and enjoy the new flexibility afforded by the remote environment. Businesses are beginning to understand that the office isn't the office anymore — it's wherever its employees are.

Consequently, some of the world’s biggest conglomerates have already proposed fundamental changes to how their workforces will operate. Take the announcement from Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, in May which stated the tech giant would allow many employees to work from home permanently. He added that — within a decade — as many as half of the company’s more than 48,000 employees would work from home, citing coronavirus as the primary motivator behind his decision. He even went as far as saying that after the pandemic, he expects remote work to be “a growing trend.”

That was shortly after Twitter chief exec, Jack Dorsey, also announced in a company-wide email that the social network would allow its employees to work from home “forever” following the experiences of the pandemic. It’s clear, already, that — thanks to the pandemic — the way in which we work and how businesses arrange their employees is on the verge of a revolution.

“The pandemic has obviously triggered trillions of dollars of economic wreckage, and some business leaders may feel this will stop changes already under way, but instead, these shockwaves will accelerate the need to modernize,” Cognizant says.

Talking with clients, the firm has identified several thematic business challenges that companies face today, and corresponding solutions, or “starting points” that it recommends organizations should take onboard to help modernize the remote workplace and enable a better employee experience going forward — something it refers to as “Remotopia.”

One theme is “modernizing company data.” Cognizant believes that companies that haven’t gotten control of their data are already behind, and the new economy will make it harder to recover.

“It’s no longer justifiable to pay to maintain terabytes of data and then not use it for business outcomes,” the firm says. “Improving decisions and experiences (and growth) with applied intelligence is infinitely more difficult without data that is relevant, accessible, secure and used to improve decisions or customer experiences.”

Another tactic that businesses can employ to get ahead is letting go of legacy applications. “The first step is a complete software audit to understand which applications make the most sense to modernize, which should be left alone and which can be turned off,” it says.

However, the principle solution in this list is modernizing and empowering how employees work. Ideas and practices about how we work together have changed thanks to the pandemic, and the assumption about where work happens has been turned on its head. Collaborating from across the street/block/state/globe, and creating a culture at a distance are now all core to keeping businesses agile in the future. It takes more than just bringing a laptop home.

“Today’s employees seek the same high-quality experience as a consumer using the best software. Old, slow, difficult to-use interfaces and systems hinder how employees interact, collaborate, store and exchange information and get work done,” adds Cognizant.

“Seamless, secure connections across web, mobile, voice, collaboration systems, platforms and processes are part of the workplace of today and tomorrow. We aren’t going backward, so the time is now to get ahead of the modern employee experience.”