Hybrid work forces companies to overhaul digital operations management

The debate about remote work has largely settled. What's emerged instead is messier and more permanent: a hybrid reality where employees split their time between office, home, and wherever else work happens to find them. In Spain, about one in six workers now operates this way regularly, with many companies settling into stable patterns of one or two remote days per week. Banking, insurance, energy, and professional services have all normalized this split existence. But the conversation has shifted. It's no longer about whether people should work from home. It's about how to keep everything running when they do.

This is where the real strain shows up—not in policy documents, but in the daily friction of distributed operations. When an employee moves from the office to their kitchen table, their access credentials sometimes fail. Applications behave differently outside the corporate network. Devices fall out of sync with security patches. Video calls stutter. Support tickets pile up because the person who needs help is no longer sitting three desks away. These are small problems individually. Accumulated across hundreds or thousands of workers, they become a drag on productivity and a source of quiet frustration that erodes how people feel about their work.

Spanish technology company Flexxible, which builds platforms for managing digital work environments, has been watching this unfold in real time. According to Josep Prat, one of the company's cofounders, the core challenge has fundamentally changed. "The conversation for years centered on where people worked," he explains. "Now the challenge is making sure everything operates correctly every single day, regardless of where the employee is." The shift sounds simple in theory. In practice, it's forcing IT departments to rethink almost everything about how they operate.

The old model—waiting for users to report problems, then responding—no longer scales in a hybrid environment. When your workforce is scattered across multiple locations and working from multiple devices, reactive support becomes a bottleneck. IT teams lose visibility. Vulnerabilities linger longer. Routine maintenance becomes harder to coordinate. The load on internal resources grows without a corresponding increase in staff or budget. Flexxible argues that companies need to move toward something different: real-time monitoring, automated diagnostics, and systems that can fix many problems without human intervention.

The numbers suggest the potential is significant. In analyzing real-world environments with clients and partners, Flexxible found that automation can diagnose IT problems 65 percent faster than traditional methods. Workers recover roughly 78 percent of the time they would normally spend waiting for technical support. Perhaps most striking: the company estimates that up to 74 percent of support and operations tickets could be automated entirely. That's not a marginal improvement. That's a fundamental restructuring of how IT work gets done.

Flexxible itself operates from Barcelona and Terrassa, but its reach extends to the United Kingdom, the United States, India, and Brazil. The company's solutions run on close to a million devices globally. Gartner has recognized it in multiple categories related to employee digital experience and digital workplace management. But the company's real significance lies in what it represents: the recognition that hybrid work isn't a temporary adjustment or a negotiated compromise. It's the permanent operating environment. And that environment demands a complete rethinking of how companies manage the technology that makes work possible.