Hybrid work to evolve in 2023

Hybrid work strategies continued to dominate, but have evolved as we pivot to live with Covid. The concept of a four-day week became popular in 2022, for example.

"In 2023, hybrid work will no longer be a trend, but just part of normal everyday working life, but with flexibility at the centre," noted Pierre-Jean Châlon, Head of Hybrid Work Solutions and Peripherals, APJ, HP.

"For one thing, while there have been conversations regarding the possibility of four-day work weeks, with the Singapore parliament debating the notion earlier this year, it turns out that two-thirds of employees in Singapore would much prefer flexible working arrangements that enable them to have better control of their work hours. 

"A recent IDC report showed that sentiments across Asia Pacific were similar, with more than 56% of employees in the region wanting flexible work with options to work both in the office and remotely, even beyond the pandemic."

IBM's Institute for Business Value has also found that employees around the world want flexible work. In a report exploring trends for 2023 the organisation noted that over one in three (35%) employees say
they would not apply for a job that doesn’t offer the ability to work remotely at least part-time, and two-thirds want to partner with employers to define their work arrangements.

There is a mismatch between employees and employers, however. "Yet, 77% of companies that currently offer hybrid work arrangements plan to change their policies in 2023. Forty percent said they will require employees to work from an office four days a week and 13% plan to bring employees back full-time," the report authors stated.

In Asia, employees and employers may be more closely aligned. HP's Châlon said: "Thankfully, we’re already seeing more relaxed attitudes towards hybrid work; in a recent survey conducted by Centre for Creative Leadership, leaders from Japan, Australia, and Vietnam were found to be more open to arrangements in which employees are not 100% on-site; Singapore ranked the highest in embracing the normalising of hybrid work, and offering the flexibility to their employees to work anywhere, at any time, while being the least likely to expect employees to be fully on-site."

Source: Deel. Ng.

"2022 saw a global evolution of workplace policies to address the challenges of hybrid work and satisfy employees’ expectations for more flexible arrangements. Many Asia Pacific (APAC) organisations have embraced the benefits of a distributed workforce to secure talent, no matter where they reside... Deel’s State of Global Hiring Report H1 2022 found that APAC has emerged as the second fastest-growing market in hiring international talent, behind Latin America (LATAM)," observed Karen Ng, Regional Head of Expansion & Market Lead Singapore, Hong Kong, ASEAN, and India, Deel.

Source: Workday. Leach.

Workday believes that the employee experience will come to the fore in 2023. "As organisations start to bed down, scale, and focus on key investments made during the pandemic to enable collaboration across their workforce, we foresee a reduction in experimentation as organisations bed down the right tools for their business. This involves consolidating and reducing the tools that were experimented with during the pandemic. Decisions are being made to integrate collaboration tools with core systems, so employees have a unified and omnichannel experience," said Damian Leach, CTO, APJ, Workday.

"This shift will see strategic investments that strengthen a cloud-first approach to technology; building on the emerging cloud backbone, tight integration and open APIs that provide everyone the same experience, no matter the user’s location or device."

Leach added: "Organisations will strive to create an integrated cloud experience; CIOs will be implementing measures to understand the utilisation of applications, tools, and services with the aim of reducing complexity and increasing resilience. The CIOs’ aim to enable a frictionless experience for employees whilst keeping data secure and meeting increasing regulatory needs will remain a delicate balance."

Châlon said that the approach to hybrid work-related technology in 2023 should focus on how it helps to get work done. "Meeting face-to-face is one way to get things done, but with the right technologies in place, the ability to access team members across different geographies and time zones will go a long way towards solving those tough problems at work," he explained.

"Investing in technology that provides employees with more equitable work experiences, whether better video that puts the participant front and centre, or audio that helps them not just be heard, but also removes distractions from creeping in. At the same time, platform-agnostic collaboration solutions will enable IT departments to take advantage of hybrid work without having to deploy new audio and video infrastructure," he said. 

Ng expects the momentum for international hires - the recruitment of employees who continue to reside overseas instead of where the company is based - to continue into 2023, driving more organisations to look at compliance, payroll and human resource solutions to streamline talent recruitment and management processes, address the challenges of the future of work, and reshape employee experience.

The solutions will have to support changing employee expectations, she said. "2022 saw a shift in the way we perceive the role of work and the importance of work-life balance - with more employees seeking flexible work arrangements such as fixed off-site days, four-day work weeks, or flexible hours that empowers them to pursue their desired lifestyle and needs," she explained. 

"As organisations continue to find the sweet spot between organisation efficiency and employee expectations amid the hybrid work era, we expect to see the continual emergence of new work trends that will dominate APAC in 2023. One trend we can expect is the emergence of Chief Remote Officer roles* that are designed to support and manage the opportunities and challenges that comes with a growing remote and hybrid workforce. We also anticipate the rise of workcations and flex holidays, where employees are granted the autonomy to work while travelling, or decide what holidays they take instead of a-one-size-fits-all calendar.

Security continues to be a concern. “The pandemic might be receding, but remote working is here to stay,” observed Jon Clay, VP of Threat Intelligence at Trend Micro. “That means a renewed threat actor focus on unpatched VPNs, connected SOHO devices and back-end cloud infrastructure in 2023**. In response, organisations will need to focus on helping overworked security teams by consolidating attack surface management and detection and response to a single, more cost-effective platform.”

The IBM Institute for Business Value recommends that employers partner with employees to design custom hybrid work models, but also stated: "Allow individuals to customise arrangements and adopt technology that enables secure remote work."

The technology may require a complete overhaul, however, because of cyberthreats. Righard Zwienenberg, Senior Research Fellow at ESET, said that security coverage tends to be uneven with current hybrid working arrangements. "(What if) the home network is compromised and then connects to company network? Security administrators are good at protecting infrastructure in the company but how do you protect yourself against (a) home network controlled by a router (in turn) controlled by the Internet service provider?" he pointed out.

Trend Micro's Future/Tense: Trend Micro Security Predictions for 2023 also discusses Zwienenberg's scenario. According to the report, VPNs are a particularly attractive target for cybercriminals as a single solution can be exploited to target multiple corporate networks. Home routers, which connect home networks to the Internet, are a vulnerability as they’re often left unpatched and unmanaged by central IT.

Chern-Yue Boey, Senior VP, Asia Pacific, SailPoint, said shadow IT would also become a security concern, commenting that hybrid working patterns that "appear here to stay" are worrying. "Singapore in particular was just heralded the champion of hybrid work in the region; countries like Japan, Australia and Vietnam were also reported to be following suit. With this continued pattern of alternating between work-from-home and office arrangements, cloud-based apps and services will continue to see shadow IT as a persisting phenomenon. While employees may perceive using unapproved IT systems, devices, software, apps and more on unauthorised devices to work more efficiently, the flip side is that: what IT is unaware of, they cannot support nor ensure its security," he said.

"In (2023), security leaders then can no longer afford to not have 360-degree visibility into all unmanaged apps and devices – and the access that they are accorded. With that, adopting a Zero Trust approach will be essential to ensuring businesses avail timely access to employees with least privilege enforced, but with just-enough access based on roles and policy logic to prevent security mishaps. 

"Especially as the influx of new digital identities proves traditional approaches like perimeter security obsolete, businesses will also increasingly find other commonly enforced tools like multifactor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO) tools to be inadequate simply because they are unable to govern access dynamically. Instead, for Zero Trust to truly take effect, identity security must be at its core – rather than integrated in a piecemeal manner - to maintain the round-the-clock oversight needed to prevent unauthorised access and resulting breaches, even amidst employee movements and organisational restructures."

"Many organisations are now moving from being reactive to employing a proactive IT security operations centre, which significantly reduces business disruption. An integrated cyber-resilience approach helps companies anticipate, protect against, withstand, and recover from adverse cyber events. By using an automated triage and incident response process, organisations can focus on the
most concerning and high-risk issues across the digital workforce," suggested Gina Wong, MD – Singapore, Kyndryl.

*According to Deel, most job descriptions for a chief remote officer revolve around remote team setups, including hosting in person events, detailing how to work in different timezones, compensation strategies, and internal communications tools. 

**VPNs stands for virtual private networks, while SOHO refers to small-office, home-office.