Hybrid Working, Five Years On — What IT Leaders Have Learned

The emergency phase of hybrid working is long over. What began as an improvised response has settled into the default operating model for a large share of UK organisations — and the improvisations made under pressure are now permanent infrastructure. Five years on, IT leaders have had time to see which decisions aged well and which quietly created debt. The lessons are consistent, and most of them are not about technology at all.

Lesson one: the estate grew in the dark

Equipment bought quickly and shipped directly to homes rarely made it onto an asset register. Years later, organisations are still discovering devices they cannot account for — including printers and multifunction units purchased on expenses and connected to corporate resources.

The remedy is unglamorous but effective: run periodic discovery across every network your users touch, reconcile against procurement records, and establish a single approved catalogue so future purchases are standardised rather than improvised.

Lesson two: support cost moved, it did not disappear

Distributed working shifted support from a walk-up desk to a queue of remote tickets. Each one takes longer, requires more diagnostic effort and depends heavily on the user's ability to describe the problem. Print and peripheral issues are disproportionately represented because they involve local hardware the helpdesk cannot see.

• Standardise device families so support staff troubleshoot a handful of known models rather than dozens.
• Use cloud management to monitor device health remotely and resolve issues before users notice.
• Publish self-service guides for the ten most common faults, which typically account for the bulk of ticket volume.
• Track resolution time by category to expose where the hidden hours actually go.

Lesson three: security assumptions had to be rebuilt

The perimeter model did not survive contact with hybrid work. Organisations that adapted well moved decisively towards identity-centred controls, treating every device as untrusted until verified regardless of location. Those that bolted VPN access onto an unchanged architecture accumulated exceptions instead.

The overlooked category remains peripherals. Home printers, scanners and storage devices sit outside most endpoint programmes yet handle genuinely sensitive output. Bringing them into scope — through cloud print management, encrypted traffic and secure release for confidential documents — closes a gap that is easy to fix and easy to forget.

Lesson four: paper never went away, it relocated

Office print volumes fell substantially. Household print volumes rose. People still print contracts to sign, reports to review and documents to check away from a screen. Organisations that pretended otherwise simply lost visibility of the output, along with any control over its security or cost. Those that accepted the behaviour and provided a managed, compliant route kept both.

Lesson five: predictability beats optimisation

Perhaps the most common reflection from IT leaders is that finance colleagues valued predictable costs more than marginally lower ones. Subscription and managed models won support not because they were always cheapest, but because they made budgeting reliable across a distributed estate and removed the constant drip of small, unplanned purchases.

What the next five years demand

1. Design for movement. Assume people work across several locations each week and build access, support and print around that reality rather than around a desk.
2. Extend governance to every endpoint. Peripherals belong in your asset register, patch cycle and security policy.
3. Consolidate deliberately. Fewer device families and fewer suppliers means less support surface and better commercial leverage.
4. Report on sustainability. Distributed estates make Scope 3 reporting harder; choose suppliers who can provide return, recycling and energy data.
5. Invest in the team. The skills that matter now — cloud administration, identity, vendor management — differ from those a datacentre estate required.

A quieter conclusion

The organisations coping best are not those with the most advanced technology. They are those that documented what they own, standardised what they buy, and extended existing governance to the awkward edges of the estate. It is patient work rather than transformational work — and it is exactly the kind of steady, practical progress Brother has supported UK IT teams through for decades, at your side as the workplace keeps changing.