Digital Transformation Today

6 Ways The Digital Workplace Is Evolving

It should be no surprise that the digital workplace continues to evolve rapidly, and sometimes in ways that can throw companies off balance. Many of the current trends draw from consumer tools such as mobile apps and social networks, which can be a challenge to incorporate or emulate in the enterprise, according to an article and infographic from Forbes.

Understanding it all can help companies deal with those changes, so here are six ways the digital workplace is evolving.

  1. Flattening of organizational structures: Companies are moving toward models where any worker can interact with any other worker. It’s about pushing decision-making down the organization and ultimately out to the edge to the people who are interacting with customers. The adoption of collaboration and content management solutions are being driven by this phenomenon.
  2. Flexible hours: Flexible working hours help companies better manage their office space by using shared desk and hoteling. For workers, the advantage is increased flexibility to create a better work-life balance. Our experts have seen that the key is to maintain productivity regardless of where workers are, whether it’s at the office, at home, at a cafe or on the train. That’s becoming increasingly possible thanks to ubiquitous bandwidth and mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.
    The challenge for businesses is they must not only ensure they’re able to support such devices in the corporate environment but also enable employees to collaborate with colleagues and access documents and data.
  3. Customer expectations: Customers are putting organizations under pressure to be more responsive and deliver information to the right people at the right time. Integration and context are key pieces here. It’s important to not silo information in systems, but make if both “findable” and easily “shareable.” At the same time, systems must understand individuals and their jobs to ensure the timely delivery of pertinent information that addresses a specific customer challenge. Part of this challenge is cultural — requiring a move from a mindset of hoarding information to a habit of sharing information.
  4. Rising employee expectations: Employee expectations are also on the rise. They’re much more attuned to the purpose of the organization. In other words, is there anything beyond driving profitability? Collaborative technologies can help to more effectively communicate and reinforce the company’s culture. This is especially important with a distributed workforce. Employees are also now more empowered to share their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders within an organization.
  5. The cloud: Cloud technology offers many advantages, making it easier and quicker for companies to deploy social enterprise and other collaboration tools and keep them constantly updated with the latest features. However, the reality is some organizations still require on-premises solutions, so hybrid is the likely scenario for many organizations, and addressing integration as well as identity management (federation, single sign-on) becomes even more important.
  6. The end of email: OK, not quite, but collaborative technologies offer better solutions for many types of communications. They can preserve conversations to improve findability, allow more users to discover and participate in relevant discussions, and make it easier to collaborate on documents without creating many unreconciled versions.

Of course, these aren’t the only changes happening in the digital workplace. What else do you see evolving and what’s the best way to adapt to it? Share your thoughts by commenting on our Facebook and Twitter pages!”

Source: Forbes, September 2013

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