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Digital Transformation continues to be one of the long-term and on-going organizational initiatives of businesses worldwide. Every step in the digital transformation journey must keep in mind key objectives like business process transformation, customer service continuity, and employee productivity, however more importance is now being given to building an employee-oriented workplace and work culture. The unprecedented challenges that companies have faced in recent time required them look at temporary arrangements that could help their employees to not just work remotely but also efficiently. However, as businesses are returning to a level of normalcy, the real challenge that businesses are now facing is how to build a next-generation, sustainable and future-oriented workplace that delivers consistent employee experience in the hybrid work environment.
To meet the emerging employee expectations, and to effectively build a workplace of the future, businesses are exploring every possible opportunity, tool, solution, and concept that has the potential to deliver an outstanding experience. Businesses are trying to strike a balance between people, the workplace, and technology in order to build a flexible, yet sustainable work environment for their employees. Organizations globally have already started investing in workplace technologies that enable their employees, partners and customers to collaborate and execute tasks in an effective manner, by accessing all the necessary tools and solutions anytime through any device.
Imperatives for Organizations in Building Workplace of the Future
As businesses have embarked on this journey to implement a future-proof, technology-based, flexible working environment, there are certain areas that they have to necessarily focus on when trying to build a modern workplace.
Some of the key areas that businesses need to look at include:
A. Overall Employee Experience: How to minimize “employee fatigue” and enable employees to experience consistent experience, be it from office or from home?
B. Workplace Revival: How to re-build existing office space (meeting rooms) so that employees can have zero contact meetings within offices?
C. Automation: Can there be voice enabled meetings, business process automation, and AI based assistants that can simplify employee tasks?
D. Collaboration: Is there a need for tools/solutions that enables employees, partners and customers to communicate, collaborate and exchange ideas through one single platform?
E. Secure Work Environment: How to ensure that employees working from offices and/or from home are not prone to any security threats without impacting productivity?
With these broad considerations, stakeholders within the organizations will be able to ensure customer service continuity and employee wellbeing. These factors will also help businesses to plan their future course of actions in terms of technology investments and also maintain RoI for the current IT infrastructure investments.
“While the concept of hybrid workplace has existed in the past, businesses will experience the truest meaning of a hybrid workplace going forward as they will look to strike balance between in-office and remote employee experience” Apalak Ghosh, Head-Cloud & IT Infrastructure, Frost & Sullivan
Modern Workplace Building – Is it that Simple?
While the above-discussed parameters need to be necessarily considered by CIOs and IT decision makers during workplace transformation decisions, the bigger challenge would be to address how to integrate new-age solutions with already existing legacy infrastructure. In order to optimize the investments and build a workplace of the future, it becomes important to have the right technology partner who would assist, guide and co-partner with business in every stage of this transformation.
Some of the key observations that businesses are witnessing with respect to implementation of a modern workplace includes
- 84% of the businesses said they have faced some integration and implementation issues in the past with respect to their IT infrastructure.
- More than 68% of the companies “strongly agree” that having the right technology partner is crucial for effective transformation.
- 70% of businesses believe that the modern workplace involves an amalgamation of multiple technologies, policies, and strategies that are of complex nature.
“As businesses are formulating new strategies to build workplace of future, having a clear roadmap on how should they move ahead with future technology investments becomes crucial for the success of building a modern workplace” Nithin Ramesh, Senior Consulting Analyst – Unified Communications, Frost & Sullivan
Right Partner + Right Technology = Future Proof Workplace Transformation
A proven technology partner can assist in each step of workplace transformation and in particular, can assist businesses on aspects like:
- Migration Issues: Service providers have the experience to understand business and technology landscapes, and provide the best possible migration support throughout the transformation.
- Security Integrations: With increasing adoption of cloud services and shift towards hybrid work, service providers can provide advanced encryption methodologies and other security capabilities that are inherently closer to the user
- Wider Network Coverage: Through their experience, service providers can provide a consistent connection with strong calling capabilities for better employee collaboration, especially with the shift to cloud technology
- Integration Assistance: Service providers who have built strong technology practices, will have the ability to understand the existing IT environment and accordingly build a simpler integration and transformation strategy
- A Single Point-of-Contact: With a single unified SLA, the service provider will be one common touch-point for businesses and would reduce the complexities involved in dealing with multiple vendors
“The future workplace is no longer a fixed location with fixed hours. It will be exciting to help organizations adopt technology which allows them to merge their digital and physical worlds” Sam Bednall, Head of Modern Workplace, South Asia, Telstra
Most of the workplace revival strategies developed and implemented in the past revolved around in-office environment. However, with a growing mix of in-office and work-from-home employees, the complexities involved in having a true hybrid workplace are increasing. In this scenario, having a strong partner who can help businesses build a workplace of the future has become more important than ever.
