Modern Digital workplace trends 2020

The digital workplace has been an ever-evolving business tool to excel for many organizations and so do the Digital Workplace Trends. They say, “Lower-level minds discuss human beings, medium level minds discuss current affairs and the high-level minds discuss ideas” But the greatest of all minds discuss ‘Change’ and the ways to utilize change to its best! The present global emergency has given rise to the urgent evolving needs to empower the workforce operating remotely. With the organizations trying their best to evolve, innovations in the pre-existing ways to connect continue to be worked upon to transform work culture and have a deep impact on today’s modern digital workplace environment. The major challenge now is the digitalization of the workplace to adapt quickly to meet the needs of the customers. In doing so, almost every company is looking to evolve its old intranet into a modern business tool. This investment is often expected to highly improve the employee experience, add workplace flexibility, and most importantly, upgrade their profitability/strategic business goals. Modern Digital workplace trends 2020 Business leaders need to be constantly running for visualizing and achieving a sustainable digital practice i.e; to upgrade to latest relevant business strategies while keeping in mind, their feasibility according to their organizational culture. But keeping up with the changes in the market and adopting newer trends that will produce favourable business outcomes might turn out to be critical too. In this blog, let’s look into the modern digital workplace trends that are going to impact the IT industry the most. 1. Flexible and remote work backed up by smart technology will be ever-popular Fueled by global mobility, environmental concerns, higher real estate costs and now, the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the trend for remote working is experiencing a sharp rise. The modern digital workplaces are expected to be accessible on any device in any location. Thus, the days of an optionally accessed intranet will be gone soon! We can look forward to its evolution at jet speed, paving way for an era of an intelligent digital assistant with multiple smart features. Just like a good professional partner, your digital assistant will often know what you need even before you actually ask for it. 2. The Digital Workplace will become an integral part of the employee lifecycle. While the concept of the intelligent workplace was initially considered to be a threat to the IT & HR departments, Internal Communications teams soon began to join forces with Technology colleagues to realize the enormous impact the tool has on collaboration and communication. Now, HR and other business leaders are showing a keen interest in streamlining and positively influencing the moments that matter within the employee lifecycle. From recruitment and onboarding to professional development, training, career development, and wellbeing programs, the Modern Digital Workplace is fast becoming an essential business tool. 3. The engaged employees in the Digital Workplace will slowly turn into influencers or brand faces. The enthusiastic employees who will be the top users with a good internal following in the digital workplace can be proactively depicted as the company’s faces and can be used to circulate information about the organization’s products, campaigns and culture via their online social networks. This can turn out to be the most cost-effective, powerful, and trusted form of marketing. The best part about it is that many employees wish to have the ability to do it – we just need to make it easier for them. Modern digital workplaces will become better at enabling employees to share trusted information internally and externally at the touch of a button. 4. Microsoft Teams and Digital Workplace technology will become complementary to each other Microsoft Teams now has more than 20 million daily active users, influenced by the fact that it’s available at no additional cost to people working with Office 365. It was designed while keeping the exponentially increasing popularity of Remote work in mind. It aimed at forming a hub for teamwork in the most effective way possible. It was designed to unleash the power of teams, be it 10 people or 1000 and so does its name suggest. Teams combine one to one messaging, group messaging, voice calling, video conferencing and document collaboration into a single integrated application to enable exciting new ways of working together. The Modern Digital workplace, when coupled with teams can literally do wonders! 5. Employees wish “the information they need to Excel” to find them (not the other way around!). The emotional quotient of your workforce has a significant role to play in defining the overall productivity of your organization. Mental health thus needs to be taken care of by minimizing the effects of the constant flow of information on the web. Health and wellbeing are now high on almost every corporate agenda! The era of information overload continues in the workplace, where employees increasingly complain that they can’t find the information they need to successfully undertake their role, and business priorities get lost in this ‘noise’. To tackle this, the Modern Digital Workplace is continuously evolving to become more “intelligent”, driven by personalization, better search, improved Bots, and significantly enhanced Artificial Intelligence. 6. Businesses can’t afford language barriers. Globalization has enabled more organizations to expand and find opportunities to explore new marketplaces. But for many, language barriers in the workplace are complicating international communication. Digital workplaces will increasingly have a critical role to enable seamless collaboration in different languages. Your intranet should be making sure that you are fully loaded with the tools and collaborative potential you need to truly take your workers to the next level of productivity. 7. More Decentralization in the workplace Today’s business structures can be broadly classified under centralized and decentralized. In a centralized structure, decisions are usually taken by higher authorities who have control over the organization such as CEO, CTO, CIO etc. This structure is typically maintained in organizations with less than 200 employees. In a decentralized system, every employee in the organization has a voice in the innovative processes. Each department can come up with their respective directives for the future. As businesses are required to undergo digital transformation and grow globally, organizations are left with no choice but to rapidly innovate. This can only be achievable in the present day scenario with decentralization. The digital workplace will boosts employee engagement. Thus, it will instil a sense of ownership and facilitate competitive advantage by leveraging the power of belongingness and innovation.