The workplace of the future is a little like a salad. There is a little of this and a little of that. Ingredients that you would never put together in a different dish make perfect sense in a salad. The work salad consists of corporate tech and ideas as well as the same from the consumer world. Not long ago, these two worlds had no point of contact. Today, they are strange, if not necessary bedfellows.

Whatever you think of the new work tools, there is little chance that things are going to magically go back to the way they were. The pandemic has changed everything, some, for the better. It is a good thing that companies are expanding their work from home options. That means more opportunity for more people, especially people with disabilities. It also opens up new opportunities for people who live in remote areas to work for companies half a world away.

As ever, the big challenge with adding consumer devices to the corporate workflow is security. Consumers are really bad at it. And corporations aren't much better. Getting everyone on the right page is going to be a concern for some time to come. In the meantime, the merger between consumer and corporate technology is going forward. Here is a glimpse of what it looks like:

Corporate Power Tools in the Cloud

Every year, it makes less sense for companies to spend a lot of money and effort maintaining their own big iron to harness their corporate resources. For much less money up front and going forward, the smart play is corporate cloud computing. There are a number of benefits to this arrangement.

Tools like master data management can be performed at full power, crunching numbers from all the corporate inputs and made available to the entire workforce regardless of the device they are using. That is important because many consumer devices would be incapable of doing the heavy lifting. They are, however, quite capable of connecting to corporate networks and serving as secure, thin clients.

This is essentially the function of all corporate workstations. The cube farm is populated by workers using computers that function as thin clients. Those computers do little more than turn on the monitor and await user input via the keyboard. The number-crunching happens someplace else. That is why companies can continue to use systems that are out of date and bordering on obsolescence. In most cases, consumer systems are far more robust.

A New Kind of Meeting Requires a New Kind of Tool

Corporations love their meetings and their teams. They are powered by that small groups dynamic. Unfortunately, it is tough to recreate that group dynamic when everyone is working remotely. That is why video conferencing apps have become so popular over the course of the last 9 months.

Corporate workstations generally don't come equipped with cameras of any kind. That is the last thing the IT department would approve. But now that meetings are done remotely and teams do their work on video and chat apps, managers are having to remove that opaque tape from the top of their laptops. Here again, corporate software such as conferencing apps must trickle down to the average worker to be accessed on consumer hardware.

Consumer Internet in the Corporation Is Here to Stay

You don't want your workers spending all their time at work browsing Facebook and twitter. However, you can't ban social media and other personal pursuits, either. You just as well fire everyone. Because even before people got a taste of working from home, they were doing personal internet browsing on the company computer.

The solution is to allow people to use their own internet connection. Better still, provide a guest network so that workers can use their personal devices for personal things. Everyone is going to steal a moment to check on their kids, or their sick spouse, or their car insurance, and everything else. However, they still get their work done at the end of the day. When people get back into the office, give them a safe way to continue using their own devices. And they will give you continued productivity.

The barn door is open and the horse is out. Consumer devices are now an inextricable part of corporate life. Make it the safest and most productive arrangement possible by utilizing cloud computing and SaaS solutions, the best video conferencing tools, and air-gapped consumer internet for all those consumer devices that make their way back into the office.