How Digital Asset Management supports hybrid working

28th September 2021

Although many organisations were implementing remote working policies before the pandemic, Covid-19 has fast tracked this trend. The future of work is looking increasingly like it will be a hybrid of remote and office-based working.

Hybrid working offers benefits for both organisations and employees, but it also poses some challenges.

What is hybrid working?

Hybrid working is a flexible working model that allows employees to work from a variety of locations, including the office, for a certain number of days per week or per month. It's a model that recognises the benefits of both remote working and office-based working.

The benefits of hybrid working

There are many benefits to hybrid working for businesses and employees:

• Improved employee wellbeing - a work/life balance where employees can manage their time between home and the office improves mental health and wellbeing. Stress and the chances of employee burnout are both reduced.
• Increased productivity - with a hybrid model employees are able to work to their strengths. If they need to collaborate on a project they can go into the office, but if there's something they need to focus on without distractions they can work on it from home.
• Better working culture - greater employee autonomy leads to high satisfaction and a better working culture.

How Digital Asset Management (DAM) supports hybrid working

Maintain consistency in working practices

One of the main challenges of remote or hybrid working is losing visibility of employees. This can lead to a lack of standardisation across the organisation when it comes to data management.

John from marketing might be saving documents and images to his local machine.

Emily from accounts might be saving invoices to her local machine before uploading them to Google Drive (but keeping them on both).

The problem is you don't know, and it's a nightmare for data governance.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system means everyone's working to the same standard. All your employees, whether they're office-based or on the other side of the world, will be saving files securely - while you can control the files they're able to download.

Locate digital assets quickly and easily

Without a central location for managing digital assets it's hard to keep track of where certain files are and make sure you've got the latest version.

Let's consider an example.

Sandeep, a graphic designer, wants to create a new visual asset that includes the latest high-resolution version of his company's logo. He thinks he's only got an old version saved on his local machine, but isn't sure who to ask.

If Sandeep was in the office he could find out fairly easily, but he's working from home today. He could send an email and hope he gets a quick reply, or just use what he's got. Neither solution is ideal.

If Sandeep's organisation used a DAM he'd know exactly where to look and be able to download the latest version in multiple file formats.

Provide access to third parties

If your organisation works with third parties you need to be able to grant them access to files securely.

It can be a pain relying on slow file transfer platforms like WeTransfer. It probably won't be appropriate to grant full access to a shared drive or folder either, but free solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox don't offer granular permissions, which means you have to split files into separate folders.

A Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution like ResourceSpace makes collaboration and sharing easy without compromising data security. You'll have complete control over your DAM's permissions, allowing you to see who's viewing, uploading and downloading different assets. You can also generate secure URLs for third-party sharing.

Ready to find out how a Digital Asset Management platform will help support the hybrid working model for your organisation? Get in touch with one of our DAM experts, or try us out for free. Click below to launch your free ResourceSpace instance with 10GB of cloud storage.