With Windows Digital Workplace you can seamlessly transport the office into the home
Ensuring a great employee experience in the virtual workplace
The year 2020 saw digital workforce transformation projects kicked into hyperdrive as, through the grit and determination of IT teams, businesses made large swathes of their workforces remote.
Following months of WFH, globally most businesses have accepted that post-pandemic there’s simply no going back to ‘normal’. However, many are have come to realize that their hastily assembled remote working initiatives simply won’t cut it in the long term.
As time has passed, the impact of the employee experience when ensuring the wellbeing and productivity of remote employees is becoming more evident. Those who have to constantly navigate clunky systems are becoming increasingly frustrated and thus, decreasingly productive. Which are the exact challenges Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) was created to help solve. WVD leverages Microsoft and Citrix’s 30-year partnership in the digital workspace arena. Their shared deep well of expertise around employee experience has allowed them to create a virtual desktop that’s secure, seamless and agile, as well as easily scalable and cost-effective.
Workplace agility – bringing work home with you
There are many issues around remote working that many employees don’t realize until they have been WFH for a while. For example, for security reasons, most enterprise applications have been designed to be accessed in the office. As a result, it can make for a particularly unenjoyable employee workplace experience for workers trying to access them from home.
Another issue is how crucial videoconferencing technology is to maintaining office relationships and culture when everyone is WFH. When combined with collaboration software such as virtual whiteboards teams are enabled to work together regardless of their location. But with the lockdown necessitating so many people to rely on their home broadband, many have suffered from a lack of bandwidth necessary to make video calls natural and frictionless. Combine that with the clunky experience when accessing enterprise apps and you have yourself a perfect storm of frustration.
These are the exact kinds of hurdles WVD was created to remedy. It allows organizations to control apps and data while allowing their employees to seamlessly access those resources from their own devices, enabling smart working and a truly borderless office. And as it’s managed by Citrix Cloud Services, organizations have the combined benefit of access and security, driving cost-saving at a time when it’s most needed.
In addition, all of the end-user features WVD and Citrix have included foster a more enjoyable user experience and make it ideal for WFH. These include access to virtualized Windows 10 and Office 365 desktop along with Citrix HDX (High-Definition User Experience) technologies that provide a superior virtual app and desktop experience from any device.
And when it comes to supporting employees with digital workplace collaboration tools to enhance team communication, WVD provides real-time optimization for Teams and Skype for Business. This means it can deliver the best experience within WVD for crystal clear voice and video even in areas with low bandwidth and high latency.
Additionally, with the flexibility of an operating system that can work with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android devices, it supports Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) scenarios. Companies can even start thinking about expanding their remote work footprint into other countries or the gig economy with ease.
Data-driven wellbeing – enhancing the digital employee experience
Ensuring the wellbeing of workers is a much harder task when they aren’t sitting in an office with you – it may require a complete workplace culture change for organizations.
Peoples’ WFH situations vary wildly – some people are dealing with a full house, with their children running around and a partner also trying to work remotely. Others who live alone may have gone months barely interacting with anyone in person. So, while WVD is instrumental in helping workers avoid unnecessary disruptions as a result of awkward systems, it also goes one step further. By leveraging real-time analytics, it can detect if the user experience is declining and fix it.
It also uses behavioral analytics to support worker wellbeing and data leakage prevention by looking at the specific needs of that employee’s profile. By supporting individual working patterns, it gives employees more control of their work environment which is key for mental health. And as WVD is part of our wider Flexible Working initiative, it delivers smart working solutions and technologies to drive inclusivity and diversity. It also deploys office automation to take care of the mundane. Over time, these kinds of factors will become increasingly important to attracting and retaining new talent. These will become the traits of the future workplace that will become vital to the success and resilience of businesses.
Delivering a hybrid workplace – three heads are better than one
The partnership between Microsoft and Citrix has touched the lives of more than 500,000 joint customers and has serviced 110 million users. Their products are used by 98% of the Fortune 100.
Fujitsu has also served as a long-term partnership to both organizations. As Tier one Microsoft cloud service and an Azure Stack hub partner, we’ve collaborated with Microsoft to deliver programs and projects across almost all of Microsoft offerings. Our familiarity with each other and the digital workspace arena is what has enabled this offering to be so comprehensive and effective. We’ve undertaken the integration legwork so our customers don’t have to.
So, at a time when capital has never been more important, we’ve given our customers a flexible, scalable and cost-effective workplace solution that will reduce the time-to-value and increase ROI to ensure they’re in the best possible position to be ready for whatever comes next.
Get in touch and let us help shape your future together through our virtual digital transformation center experience. We help you to reimagine how your business and your workforce might work better in the future.
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