Tech in the workplace: What lies ahead for the digital road?

Hybrid working is a multifaceted term, but there are three key ways this will continue to evolve this year, creating successful, truly transformed businesses

While hybrid work has its benefits, it has shown its challenges in that orchestrating a hybrid team can be time-consuming and difficult, and managing projects with a hybrid team involves a deep learning curve that many are still not prepared for.

Work platforms will be a need, not a want

To cope with the overnight shift in ways of working, businesses cobbled together a few tools to get work done: Zoom for meetings, Outlook for email, Google Docs for editing, etc. But now, enterprises are realising they need a centralised platform or operating system within which all work can happen, no matter its nature or scope.

As the UK shuttles between working from home (WFH) guidance and hybrid work, adoption of work platforms to accelerate collaboration will be critical in keeping up productivity and employee engagement.

Businesses will make way for no-code and (very) low-code working by the average employee Hybrid working can be bolstered with a number of tools to manage workflows internally. The likes of ‘low-code’ and ‘no-code’ are not new concepts to the tech industry – they have been around for over a decade in some shape or form. Historically, the application of code to products has remained the territory of IT or at least people/teams with some technical experience. However, in recent years, the opportunity to use no-code and low-code tools has opened up to include regular business users. If you look at the likes of Wordpress or Canva, they produce high-quality content that requires no technical skill.

In the world of work, teams will no longer buy pre-fab tools and platforms, but instead choose those that give them the flexibility to design the workflows and processes they want, customised to the nature and breadth of their work and teams. It is this ability to work your own way that will allow teams to define the next generation of distributed work. This customisable aspect will give businesses a competitive edge in the next iteration of work.

Businesses will look for more clarity around digital transformation

Many businesses rushed to cope with the influx of tools and technologies designed to help employees maintain a number of things from engagement to safeguarding themselves from burnout by taking care of their day-to-day.

However, in some instances, enterprises were not the decision makers of the tools implemented to support this. Employees had to take the plunge into WFH into their own hands, modifying their workflows and acquiring productivity and collaboration tools with a view to becoming more effective – but it also created what is defined as shadow IT (tech that is outside the purview of an enterprise’s IT workforce). These tools drained existing IT resources and created performance degradation across companies, making digital seem like a less viable option for solving remote work issues.

For the channel, it meant that many partners were often caught in the crossfire of support issues across multiple applications due to incorrect configuration or installation of collaboration tools. These can be time consuming, costly and unnecessary for both customers and partners. To prevent this problem from worsening, partners will now be looking for solutions which will complement their customers’ existing investment choices, allowing them to be more productive without the added stress of having to learn new ways of working or without having to troubleshoot new tech tools as they go. To envision their future digital ecosystem for true transformation, this is the clarity needed.

Clearly, hybrid working is not just about working from varying locations anymore – there are so many more considerations than previously. At the top is keeping businesses operating as ‘normal’. While the term ‘normal’ varies in definition across organisations, the common goal is to ensure traditional business functions operate with optimised efficiency, minimal delay and low stress to the workforce – and this is where work platform technology can plug the gap.


Power Points

  1. Post-pandemic, hybrid working is truly here to stay. It has brought on many benefits for both employees and employers alike like greater flexibility and autonomy.
  2. However, businesses need to look at the infrastructure supporting their hybrid working journey. For effective communication and collaboration, digital tools will be at the heart of how organisations rebuild their teams for the hybrid road ahead.
  3. Adopt a centralised work platform so that all work can take place no matter its nature or scope.
  4. Implementing ‘low-code no-code’ application produces high-quality content that requires no technical skill and can maintain a competitive edge.
  5. This also provides businesses with more clarity on how these feed into enterprises’ existing digital ecosystem for true transformation.

 

Naveed Malik is regional director, EMEA, monday.com

Image credit | Shutterstock

 

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