Is Your Office Ready for the Future?

When you’re working with your team, even across a range of locations, what’s most important is a shared state of mind. That state of mind is much more important for productivity than shared office space. What are the communications and collaboration trends of today, and how can we help our teams benefit?

Services First

The real revolution of the cloud is not the fact that data or applications are located elsewhere, but rather that the cloud can make services universally available. And that’s the revolutionary trait of cloud communications: the fact that the services comes to you via subscription, so there is no infrastructure to manage. Although many workers still love their physical spaces, and there are good reasons for why, the digitization of all work services makes work more flexible.

Mobile Only

The term ‘mobile first’ is a popular buzzword, but the real breakthrough is going to come when we are ‘mobile only.’ Once every service is available for people on the road and those in the office, we can finally break the chain to the physical world.

Exceptions to the Remote Work Trend

The move toward remote work will not come without challenges, though, according to one prominent CEO. Not every job will be suitable for remote work. Some employees need to be physically near every aspect of their job. Others simply need that stability to feel emotionally engaged with their organizations. In any case, technology provides a unique opportunity to bring us closer together than ever before. We’ve come a long way from mandatory physical meetings. With real-time mobile connectivity, we can finally be “near” each other no matter where we are. We’ve come a long way from phones and intranets to Unified Communications.

The key to this innovation will be optimizing how people work together. If you think the last five years were filled with change, just wait for the next five .

Strategies

The CEO mentioned previously offers four strategies to make better use of digital technology and bring your office into the future:

1. Eliminate barriers.
   “Digital availability and workplace mobilization make it easier for us to access our work at any time — and to act on the information available. IT professionals too often have the urge to control, but the more effective strategy is to give employees the tools they need to take control themselves.”
2. Eliminate fear.
   “New technologies bring fear and apprehension: fear of change, fear of risks, and fear of control or competency. While it’s wise to not dive in headfirst without proper research, acting on fear could prevent your company from realizing its innovative potential. Today, [the move to mobile] is such a massive disruption to every industry that a failure to embrace the change would be a terrible mistake.”
3. Eliminate wastes of time.
   “Time is our most valuable resource, yet we allow so much to be wasted. Technology makes standard activities like processes, approvals, communication, and accessing information fast and simple, meaning people can spend less time on tedious administrative functions — and more time using the skills that make them valuable.”
4. Eliminate wastes of attention.
   “Humans have short attention spans, and the longer you waste their attention, the more disengaged they become. Mobile technology allows for continuous engagement, but that power can be wasted if the information provided is not valuable. Every action, process, or piece of information should be designed to maximize both engagement and productivity.”

Sources: Broadsoft, Innovation Excellence (Post by Daniel Kraft), Talent Culture (Post by Daniel Kraft)