Four Paramount Trends that Construct Digital Workplace

Both organizations and employees can no longer see themselves in an office on a full-time schedule as almost 90% of surveyed workers and managers say they are completely satisfied working from home.

The dominance of virtual work environments during the 2-year COVID-19 new normal transformed our business, workforce, relationships between employees and managers, putting at the forefront the freedom to choose when and where to work. All this blazed a trail to the formation of a digital workplace, hub of all required tools, information, and contacts, supporting your employees and automating daytoday operations.

WHY DIGITAL WORKPLACE SHOULD BE ONE OF YOUR PRIORITIES IN 2022? Apparently, adopting digital workplace for many companies who are undergoing digital transformations should become one of their priorities this year. First, because businesses get the most suited solution to address concerns related to synchronization of offline and online communications, cloud adoption, security of virtual networks, and optimization of IT infrastructure expenses. Secondly, and most importantly, a digital workplace strategy takes good care of the employee satisfaction and retention rates, helping businesses to meet your workforce flexibility, personalization, and collaboration needs. For many employees, flexibility goes to the top of their preferences, while for 54% choosing where and when to work would be pivotal and prompt them to quit jobs if employers were unable to provide the expected level of flexibility.

Another good point in favor of digital workplace is that the latter has good potential to untangle the complexity of haphazardly adopted remote work solutions that may often overlap their legacy IT infrastructure. A case in point: Infopulse helped a leading pharma company modernize their IT infrastructure to achieve topnotch productivity and business efficiency. Backed by the digital workplace, businesses can also benefit from maximum visibility into their IT infrastructure and projects, tasks, operations, experiences, and interactions of employees and managers. the speed of a digital workplace adoption based on the current workforce and businessneeds.

HYBRID WORK MODEL – WHAT IS “ANYWHERE PRODUCTIVITY”? While remote work saved millions of knowledge workers from losing their livelihoods, only 13% said they would like to work from home and 12% from

Although the workfromhome environment proved to positively impact the employees’ productivity (about 48% said their relationships at work improved and 50,5% experienced fewer distractions), the haphazard adoption of remote work solutions also posed some challenges: • Legacy tech stack and tools • Traditional intranet with many siloes • Disorganized digital processes and workflows

• Complicated access to shared knowledge and insights • A multitude of collaboration and communication tools and technologies.

Embracing a digital workplace can help tackle those challenges, relying on improved operational practices, cloud services, innovative tools and technologies. Before taking any further steps, we recommend studying trends that influence the development and the office all the time. The rest 72% opted for a hybrid work model (home and office for 2/3 days).

Going hybrid could follow a gradual decline of the office-only environment, caused by the workplace paradigm shift. However, the global surge of COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the widespread adoption of all connectivity solutions (cloud collaboration, human capital management, learning management systems, etc.). What we see today is the need of balancing the best of both worlds. Only in 2022, we can expect that almost 60% of organizations will stick to a hybrid work model, rushing to provide their workforce with flexible work hours and meet their working location preferences. As seen from the table below, employees worldwide choose Hybrid with its flexibility and freedom they can have at home and other locations (see the graph).

Hybrid (home and one or more other locations)

Home only Global

U.S.

UK

Japan

8% France

Australia

Germany

Office only 12% 11%

The ultimate goal of adopting a hybrid digital workplace is enabling a “productivity anywhere” work model, aiming to remove the employees’ dependency on a specific location supported with the right resources for seamless work and collaboration with other team members.

CLOUD, AI/ML/NLP – KEY ENABLERS OF INNOVATIVE DIGITAL WORKPLACE The cloud engine that has been powering transition to remote work, today is one of the building blocks of a digital workplace platform. The world is rushing to transition to the cloud (almost all legacy apps will transition to the public cloud by 2024) to acquire that feel of readiness for any possible business disruptions. The cloud enables more reliable and agile business operations, business continuity, optimizes workforce management and cybersecurity. See what other benefits business receive with the cloud transformation.

Cloudbased platforms also help consolidate data and empower your workforce with advanced data analytics and data intelligence. On top of that, it is cloud infrastructure that makes seamless, omnichannel experience and digital collaboration possible. With the inclination to a hybrid form of work, cloud as a technology will make other innovations be integrated into in a digital workplace framework. For example, like it is with AI enabled personalization that can be integrated with learning management systems or connected to an organization’s modern intranet to deliver personalized content and recommendations based on the employee’s interests, location, user profile, interactions, etc. AI/ML can also support advanced data intelligence to help detect anomalies in data and help employees proactively react to possible changes. The other AI use cases that can beef up a digital workplace are: • Knowledge Mining allows automating timeconsuming navigation and discovery of huge volumes of unstructured/

structured/semi-structured data. Po wered with AI services, Knowledge Mining searches through multiple documents, understands them, generates metadata, classifies, and automatically tags documents to help employees organize data, generate insights faster, and make more informed decisions. DIGITAL COLLABORATION AND AUTOMATION A recent survey confirms that 91% of enterprises use digital collaboration platforms to connect their remote workers and 84% to enable communication

between workers, managers, and departments. The leading positions among them take videoconferencing and cloud

• Cognitive Enterprise Search, the ad vanced form of indexing equipped with ML and NLP, which understands the context of a query and the inquirer’s intent. It allows analyzing and organizing content to meet the employee’s expectations. • Virtual Digital Assistants like chatbots can function as employees’ personal helpers delivering only relevant content and personalized information.

While for HR managers, chatbots can become an additional source of automating their routine tasks with collection and distribution of useful intel. based data storage solutions that make the backbone of a digital collaboration platform. Videoconferencing is expected to only increase its impact on the global market, reaching $27.3 billion by 2026.

However, digital collaboration requires the speedier completion of many repetitive tasks. The effectiveness of the digital workplace will greatly depend on the automation of many routine management processes and managerial tasks, such as approval, application, onboarding, and other activities that AI, RPA and similar intelligent automation technologies can handle.

Overall, the digital collaboration strategy should be focused not only on the choice of tools but also peoplecentered strategies, allowing enterprises to: • Optimize communication and interaction between your remote and onsite teams • Improve workflows and business performance • Facilitate access to the relevant information • Prioritize positive employee experience • Maintain high workforce productivity levels.

CONCLUSION Digital workplace trends like cloud, AI, hybrid work model, digital collaboration and automation come with many transformational opportunities not only for the workforce but also for managers and business owners. It is essential to understand their impact on your business and which of them you should start adopting to support your digital workplace strategy.