Of the over two million federal employees and four million contractors in active government service, only three percent were full-time teleworkers prior to the pandemic. Practically overnight, that number shot up to 59 percent in March of 2020.
The public sector wasn’t shielded from the global shift that the COVID-19 pandemic rippled throughout the entire world. Essentially building the plane as it was in flight, various public sector teams scrambled to create an uncharted working environment while maintaining a pivotal level of security.
The humbling realities of hybrid and fully-remote work present a new set of challenges with one core issue: how can you get people who aren’t physically together to work seamlessly as a cohesive team?
To tackle a seemingly insurmountable challenge, you have to break it into digestible parts:
Efficiency Challenges
Getting on the Same Page
Rising to the Challenge
Empowering a New Era of Work
Let’s break each of these challenges down even further:
Efficiency Challenges
Capturing the magic of an in-person discussion with all of its organic brainstormings is a massive challenge when people are not all physically together. Of course, there are solutions like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams that serve as communication systems for hybrid teams. However, communication is just one piece of the puzzle.
How do you harness the in-room energy to creatively approach mission-critical initiatives when there isn’t a room to meet in?
To add an additional caveat for government agencies, security is of the utmost importance. More locations, more devices, and more networks call for a comprehensive approach that adheres to certain levels of security. FedRAMP-approved (or in progress) solutions are not a nice-to-have, but a must-have that should be added to your public sector toolbox.
Getting on the Same Page
Twenty-two percent of employees told us they’re considering or planning to move more than 50 miles away from a core office location, either permanently or temporarily. Twelve percent have already made that move since the start of the pandemic. Additionally, a recent study conducted by Nature revealed that employees working together in the same physical space formed connections and relationships that were not made with remote employees.
Video conferencing and chat solutions only serve to increase the volume of messages across various applications and increase reliance on those forms of asynchronous communication. On the security front, these communications applications only serve to further increase the risk of being compromised.
Your team members could be anywhere in the world, across any number of time zones. Yet the solutions many organizations are using are still designed around the idea of everyone clocking in at the same time. The future of meetings doesn’t have to be confined to cells on a screen.
Rising to the Challenge
To address data silos, agencies need to leverage the right tools to keep up with their ever-evolving workflow.
These tools should:
Create a true brainstorming experience
Improve the overall security posture
Enable the real-time sharing of ideas
Unify apps into a single platform
Be easily customizable
Have we talked about security yet? Because they should be secure.
A modern platform that allows agencies to bring all relevant data, documents, and intelligence together in a single place empowers teams to approach any initiative with better situational awareness and contextual decision-making.
Empowering a New Era of Work
The evolution of the public sector calls for advanced tools that enable employees to collaborate within advanced mission workstreams regardless of location. If we haven’t emphasized this enough, these tools need to be secure.
With the right tools, the public sector will gain all of the advantages of in-person meetings in a hybrid work environment. And if you use Bluescape, you can recreate that in-room magic from afar with the utmost security.
The Bluescape secure online workspace solution is here to meet those challenges. It’s ready to serve the most complex federal missions and built to protect the most sensitive mission data, helping to usher in a new era of work for government agencies and their personnel.
Want to learn about how to tackle the challenges of a modern public sector? Read the whole story in our downloadable PDF: Closing the Federal Remote Work Gap.
