There has been no shortage of digital ink spilled about the merits and pitfalls of remote work. A seemingly unending surge of worker surveys, scientific studies, pundit prognostications and C-suite demands have coalesced around the one intractable truth — nobody seems to agree if remote work is a productivity boon or bust. To be sure, today’s companies are highly motivated to understand this dynamic.

As the leaves begin to fall and the season changes, it’s a reminder that this challenging, disruptive and unprecedented year is already coming to a close. It also means that leaders will be assessing their teams, evaluating their strengths and limitations to improve their capacity in the year ahead. After a pandemic year, these evaluations will be more complicated and multifaceted than ever before.

For many people, work was redefined in 2021. Whether employees navigated a remote work environment for the first time or managed new tools associated with accelerated digitalization, the way work was accomplished – and what even constitutes work – looks different than it did a year ago, and it will continue to evolve in the year ahead.

As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s more important than ever that teams be productive, efficient, and engaged. This is especially true as companies make challenging decisions about the future while grappling with the repercussions of the past year. For instance, a Gartner survey of company executives across multiple industries found that 82 percent plan to offer flexible work arrangements moving forward, including remote and hybrid work opportunities. The benefits are evident.

Facebook Twitter Share As companies begin to emerge from the recent pandemic, there is a growing debate about the efficacy of pandemic-inspired work arrangements. Some organizations are committed to continuing workplace flexibility, while others insist on bringing people back to the office. Of course, many are taking a hybrid approach, allowing people to work remotely and on-site.

Continued Coronavirus uncertainty and employee preferences are delaying in-person returns to the office, making long-term workplace disruption an inevitable part of today’s business environment. According to Gartner, 82 percent of company leaders plan to allow people to work remotely at least part of the time moving forward.

Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.

As businesses emerge from a pandemic year, cybersecurity concerns are necessarily top of mind . Companies face expansive cybersecurity threats on many fronts, prompting 75 percent of business leaders to view cybersecurity as integral to their organization’s COVID-19 recovery. They undoubtedly face an uphill battle. Surging ransomware attacks and increasingly deceptive phishing scams are attracting national attention, while more than 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the US alone.

The recent pandemic pushed medical facilities and staff to the brink, taxing resources, exhausting employees, and disrupting decades of norms and protocols. It also accelerated technological trends that were quickly becoming popular, namely the centrality of technology and data in patient care. Today, many medical practices are digital-first operations, embracing telehealth and remote work at far greater levels than before the pandemic.

From healthcare to education to critical infrastructure, nobody seems to be safe from cyber attacks. Not even video game creators. News broke in early June that video game giant Electronic Arts was one of the latest victims of a major breach. At first glance, this is just another story of hackers breaking into a victim and finding their way to a sizable pay day. Nothing new here. Plenty of attacks happen every week, right? However it was the way that the attackers got in that was interesting.