We weren’t ready to work from home

Call it teething problems, disorganisation or plain Luddism: the first few weeks of working from home were, for many, far from smooth.
Set aside for a second the impact of hunkering down with children, paramours and housemates. The coronavirus lockdowns revealed a deep division even between white-collar workers: those employed by companies that have invested in what it takes for employees to switch truly seamlessly between the office and working from home, and those employed by companies that haven’t. Many people discovered it was a myth they could do their job just as easily from the dining room table. What might be de rigueur in Silicon Valley is far from normal elsewhere.
Among firms with more than $1 billion of revenue, a surprisingly small portion — perhaps 10% — is used to having much of its workforce regularly work remotely, Gartner analyst Brian Kropp estimates. Another 40% has established work-from-home practices, but didn’t necessarily have the adequate infrastructure for the current crisis. The remaining 50% was unprepared and has been scrambling to catch up with panic buying of services and hardware.
That unpreparedness might help explain the whipsawing attitudes towards those facilitating remote work, not least Zoom Video Communications, the voguish web-conferencing provider. At first, there was the upswing. Zoom saw the number of simultaneous users jump from 10 million at the start of the year, to some 200 million by April 1 and 300 million on April 21. Then the backlash, as a
series of companies warned their employees against using Zoom’s services.
Daimler AG, the parent of luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz, cited the software’s “various security gaps” in a memo reported by Bloomberg News, pointing its staff instead towards Microsoft Inc’s Teams collaboration platform. Yet a slew of such moves probably has as much to do with companies’ preparedness for remote working as it does with any deficiencies on Zoom’s side: Employees seemed simply not to know what they were supposed to be using.
Early in the lockdown, it seemed feasible to let employees use a range of different products if it was to be a temporary arrangement. As the restrictive measures last longer, firms are having to choose between technologies. Microsoft Teams, for instance, can cost as much as $35 monthly per user.
Scale that to tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and it becomes a major cost. You probably don’t want to be paying for several duplicate services at once. Slack Technologies Inc’s experience highlights the unreadiness: It enjoyed a surge not just in total users, but also in new customers — firms that didn’t previously use its tools.
For us as a company, however, the shift is dramatic. In each of Q3 and Q4, we added around 5,000 net new paid customers.
Executives are realising that work-from-home means more than just email and videoconferencing. That’s creating an
opportunity for firms like Citrix Systems Inc and Teamviewer AG, which provide so-called
virtual private networks letting employees access corporate systems remotely.

—Bloomberg