Twenty years ago, “the workplace” was a pretty simple concept – a shared, physical space that employees would use daily during set hours of the day.

Fast-forward to 2020, and things are no longer so straightforward.

In this ever-connected era, the boundaries between where people work are becoming increasingly blurred. Many of us increasingly find that our laptops are our “office.” We can complete a huge array of tasks anywhere in the world, and outside the confines of a physical office.

Spontaneous meetings to share new knowledge and information become more cumbersome to arrange and crossed wires might easily occur. Unlike a physical workplace, a digital one needs a different set of strategies to get your team off the ground.

A digital workplace is built around a company’s technological environment: email, virtual meeting tools, and the social media presence. It involves embracing digital solutions to traditional admin processes – checking payments online or entering new sales opportunities in a cloud-based platform that teams can view from their smartphones.

Most businesses have some variation of a digital workspace. For most, opportunities to streamline their way of doing things are becoming more frequent – whether it’s new fintech apps for the finance team, or employees migrating to a newer, more intuitive cloud-based solution where they can work on projects together.

The good news is that digital transformation does not have to be a costly exercise. It’s about cultivating a company culture where digital processes are explored and embraced. Of course, for businesses to be productive wherever they are, they’ll need the right hardware and software to hand. But once that’s in place, a truly digital workplace is one where management leads by example.

Business leaders can build a digital workplace by creating protocols on how virtual meetings are planned and conducted. They can offer training to those who need support in using new software. And they can invest time in becoming more proficient with digital tools themselves, in order to make their business more competitive.

As more and more businesses become more agile in how and where they work, co-working and flexible work environments complement the freedom and efficiency of this new way of working.

Modern businesses are aspiring to not only be flexible, but agile also.

But what’s the difference, and why does it matter?

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change,” Einstein once said, and it’s a concept widely recognised by businesses today in conversations about flexibility and agility. But while these terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to two very different business capabilities.

Agility is described as ‘the ability to move quickly and easily’ while flexibility points at ‘the ability to change.’ For long-term success, businesses should be prepared for both.

Recent political events in the UK, US and other key global markets have shown that the socio-political environment is becoming ever more unpredictable. It goes without saying that events in key markets have ripple effects on businesses around the world, and it has led to many developing contingency plans that involve significant changes, such as migrating head offices or key manufacturing plants.

Others are taking a longer-term view, reviewing their entire business model to make sure it is prepared to withstand both the current challenges on the table and any changes that may follow. In other words, they are aspiring to not only be a flexible business, but an agile one.

So what’s the benefit of taking a more agile approach? The answer: accuracy. As entrepreneurs and business leaders know, when and how to act can be the difference between success and failure. A businessman’s ability to read the market, read the room, and calculate the optimum moment to launch a brand, a product, or a proposal is essential to success.

Flexibility is just as important, as it’s inevitable that businesses will pivot and modify processes as they go along, and this shouldn’t be avoided. But by having an agile business, business can future-proof themselves because they are establishing a model that is built to change. Businesses that are modelled on rigid structures, processes and a fixed understanding of the world will take twice as long to react and adapt, losing time and putting them squarely behind the competition.

In the years to come, there’s no question that businesses will have to adapt to unpredictable and challenging changes to our society. The International Monetary Fund’s April report referred to slowing economic activity in that month alone, due to a range of factors affecting major economies. To name but a few: China faces increasing regulation and trade tensions with the US, Europe is dealing with weak consumer and business demand and Japan has had to manage natural disasters. With an increasingly unpredictable environment, it seems obvious that if a business does not embrace agility it will fail. But how does a static business become an agile business?

One step to agility is giving employees choice on how and where they work. According to research from IWG, this can not only reduce the CapEx and OpEx associated with a fixed office space, but increase speed to market and help businesses consolidate portfolios.

Flexible working also helps businesses to attract and retain talent, which according to Deloitte, can cost businesses from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5 – 2.0x the employee’s annual salary. This research also shows that agile businesses are more productive – 85% globally think that a more flexible approach has increased productivity in their business.

It will come as no surprise that agile leaders also make agile businesses. Steve Jobs once said: “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.” The story of Steve Jobs’ own success is evidence that this statement is true. Thanks to the recent film title that bears his name, Jobs’ grit and determination to continually adapt his business model until Apple achieved success is now world famous.

The Internet gives us unprecedented access to information and ability to reach customers are all over the world, but using it comes with risks, including cybercrime and its associated costs.

We know that cybercrime is a serious threat. It can result in damage to your IT assets, business disruptions and potentially devastating damage to your company’s reputation if client data or other confidential information is stolen or otherwise compromised.

Globally, cybersecurity tops the list of concerns of more than 12,000 executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum. However, less than half of Canadian small and medium-sized businesses consider data security an important issue, according to research by AON.

Cybercrime risks are expanding

Worldwide cybercrime costs are estimated at US$600 billion in 2018, up 20% from 4 years ago according to a report by security provider McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Businesses are increasingly connected to the Internet via their websites, social media accounts, cloud storage and computing, and other services and applications. These connections expose businesses to cybercrime and their proliferation means the risk has risen considerably in the last few years.

Furthermore, as companies go digital and shift toward the Industrial Internet of Things—connecting operational technology to information technology and the Internet—the risks and costs of cybercrime will only increase.

How are companies managing the risks?

Most businesses (76%) use anti-malware software, and a growing number are using spam filters to secure emails and firewalls to protect their network.

Still, about 1 in 5 businesses had their operations affected by cybersecurity incidents in 2017, according to Statistics Canada’s survey of over 10,000 Canadian businesses.

And many security professionals believe this number is much higher. Scalar Decisions’ research argues the number is 3 in 5 businesses, while Carbon Black found 4 in 5 businesses suffered a security breach last year.

Cyber pirates’ entry points

Email scams are still the most prevalent form of attack, responsible for 20% of security breaches. Only about half of businesses are training staff to recognize and avoid email scams, create complex passwords and safely browse the web.

StatsCan found the highest cybercrime costs are related to cloud storage and the use of personal devices to conduct business.

Using the cloud for computing and data storage can improve your bottom line, but you must be mindful that your cloud provider is protecting your data. Less than half of the businesses that used cloud storage for confidential information about their inventory, financial statements, customers, suppliers or partners used their own data protection and control security measures, such as encryption or rights management.

Using personal devices can make your business more agile, however, it also comes with a risk. Roughly two-thirds of businesses allowed the use of personal devices for business purposes, and over half of small and medium-sizedbusinesses didn’t have any security measures in place regarding this kind of use.

What should you do?

To improve your protection against cybersecurity threats at your company, here are some steps you can take to protect your data.

1. Start by identifying and classifying your data assets into at least three categories such as highly confidential, for internal use only and public.
2. Determine whether you need to archive data or you can delete it.
3. Control who has access to it, including data in the cloud.
4. Defend it from attack or privacy abuse by encrypting it or using tokenization, which is the process of turning sensitive information, like social insurance numbers, into a random string of numbers called a token. This makes it useless to the cybercriminals who want to sell it and prevents privacy violations if it gets shared with third parties.

Bottom line

Your business relies on data, and your customers, employees and business partners expect you to protect it. Lose their data, you may lose your reputation and even your business.