The Great Resignation has spoken: the hybrid workplace is here to stay

Allow us to get a little scientific for a moment. The COVID-19 pandemic is now endemic, meaning it’s still around but at a level that doesn’t significantly disrupt our daily lives. Our habits as a society have permanently altered to adapt to this everyday nuisance, such as wearing masks or isolating when we’re ill.

The workplace as we know it has also been permanently disrupted. Returning to a fully in-office environment is about as likely as the grubby self-serve olive table making a comeback at grocery stores. With remote or at least hybrid work becoming a right more than a privilege, employers who aren’t on board have found their numbers dwindling.

What’s driving the transformation to distributed teams?

In short: technology, employee preference, and economics. COVID-19 demolished the long-held belief that being in the same physical space increases collaboration and innovation. By now, we know that packing more people into tighter spaces creates a noisy, distracting, and stressful environment that actually reduces overall productivity. And don’t get us started on the commute to said cubicle farm.

We all love a good team brainstorm with our trusty whiteboard, but it no longer represents coworker collaboration. Even before the pandemic, businesses adopted cloud-based productivity suites, storage, and remote access technology like Parsec. People could share and retrieve large files, stay connected with their team, and contribute to the same project simultaneously without ever taking off their noise-canceling headphones. Ironically, the closer that people were forced to sit physically, the further apart they became functionally.

But there’s been a major exception to the remote work trend: animators, game developers, video editors, scientists, and engineers—creative teams that depend on GPU-intensive processing power, speciality hardware, and petabytes of local storage. Legacy remote-access technology simply couldn’t handle their specialized needs, which meant that they needed to be on-site with their team to work and create.

Parsec changes all that.

Creative teams don’t have to live in the studio anymore.

All those brilliant creators we idolize: are they really shut out of that beautiful remote work lifestyle? Not if Parsec has anything to do with it.

If this sounds like Klingon to you, let’s break it down. Until recently, if you worked with large, graphic-intensive files, you were tied to a studio that had the necessary storage capacity and processing power. And while you still need that hardware somewhere, using Parsec for remote access means you don’t need to be anywhere near it.

For VFX artists, illustrators, and post-production designers, that means the
freedom to work wherever they feel most inspired—whether that’s at home or halfway around the world. For engineering teams that means a more efficient allocation of processing power, and the ability to work on multiple projects simultaneously. In fact, 86% of creatives working through Parsec report saving time working remotely, and 57% are saving more than an hour every single day. For the business, all that time means happier employees, lower turnover, and reduced overhead.

Testing, user research, and QA can happen anywhere, with anyone.

User research and product testing is another resource-intensive process, particularly for game developers. Console games need to be tested on specialized dev kits to create a realistic experience; players and developers must also be on-site to ensure privacy and security. This made testing impossible during the pandemic, but now that social distancing is less of a concern, are these workers required to be in the office every day as well?

Not at all. Game developers can host Parsec directly on development machines, allowing clients to stream the build from thousands of miles away without any loss in quality. Developers, players, and the media can watch the gameplay live from a third location or record the feed to review later.

Leave large files where they are and avoid versioning conflicts.

One of the biggest friction points dealing with large files like game builds and VFX renders is the simple act of sharing the file among team members. Uploading and downloading to a shared drive from a local machine can take hours, even with a fast connection. And maintaining local copies is a recipe for version conflicts that have to be manually resolved.

With Parsec, teams can all share access to the same remote machine or render farm, which eliminates the need to move files between workstations and ensures the master file stays clean. 28% of Parsec for Teams users report saving significant amounts of time in avoiding these idle upload, download, and rendering times.

Businesses need to get with the hybrid work program – and stay with it.

Creative firms see the benefits and potential of distributed teams, and the smart ones are embracing it. Distributed teams that can access their equipment through Parsec can work on multiple projects asynchronously, allowing the same developer, colorist, or sound engineer to work on multiple projects simultaneously—or on 24 hour rotation. Now that’s what peak efficiency looks like.

Industry research firm Gartner estimates that remote work will allow organizations to hire and support 40% more people in the same amount of office space. Parsec also allows companies that depend on render farms to move that storage off-site into lower cost space away from the main office. 53% of Parsec for Teams admins are already reducing office space to support long term remote work.

Remote work boosts employee satisfaction, with 37% of employees saying they’d change jobs to one that allows remote work some or all of the time. Businesses that build distributed teams also benefit from a larger talent pool offshore, where labor costs are less than half what they are in the United States. And 73% of Parsec for Teams administrators report having already started diversifying their talent.

It’s clear that the creative industries are forever changed by their newfound ability to operate remotely. As the world transitions to this reality of flexible workplaces, remote-first cultures, and unlocked efficiencies, Parsec is committed to connecting teams to each other and their work.