Even before Corona, our workplaces were on their way to becoming digital. The demands of a global workforce – collaboration over vast distances, continuous mobile communication, home office, and flexible working hours – have provided enterprises with a unique set of challenges and opportunities that only our digital age could tackle. Of course, Corona has made the demand for the solutions acute, and rapid adoption essential. A transformation that should have been driven by strategy was hijacked by necessity. 2021 will continue to see swift implementation of digital workplace solutions, but with a year’s worth of experience, organizations and enterprises are likely to shift their focus back to their long-term strategic and planning goals. Here’s what we think you’ll see in 2021:
The move to the digital workplace in 2020 was driven less by strategic deliberation and more by the emergency. Now that we have all these digital tools to make home office and distanced working possible, we have to decide where they fit in our long-term
Just as digital strategy took a backseat to home office necessity, governance gave way to relaxed rules and open structures. These will prove to be wins in the long-term both for enterprises and their employees; enterprises were forced into uncomfortable territory by the Corona pandemic, but the gains in flexibility will likely be a boon to productivity. But businesses still need to protect their infrastructure – centralized or not – and ensure data privacy and security. As Gartner’s “6 Trends on the Gartner Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, 2020” reports, one of the trends from 2020 has been “Bring your own thing to the digital workplace.” This means that a lot of employee-owned devices, like “fitness bands, smart lights, air filters, voice assistants, smart earbuds” or even mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, are now connected to or interact regularly with enterprise systems. The question for enterprise IT is how to ensure the security of their environment and how to protect data privacy. This might entail VPNs, approval processes, defining how and when certain devices may be used with enterprise systems. These are governance questions, and they will form the backbone of any digital workplace strategy going forward.
Once the strategy and governance questions have been settled, enterprises will want to automate the processes for accessing digital workplace solutions, installing and managing security and data privacy protocols, and where necessary, approving and on-boarding the use of employee-owned devices for access to enterprise IT. This step is crucial to making sure your employees can work without unnecessary delays or bureaucratic hurdles. It will also add to productivity and enhance the overall quality of workplace satisfaction. Process automation will include enterprise app marketplaces as well as a robust intranet where processes can be communicated and documented, and employees can collaborate on business-critical activities no matter where or how they work.
How do you take the environment you have, gifted to you by unexpected and extreme circumstances, and turn it into a long-term and sustainable digital workplace strategy?
However, you decide to tackle the problem of strategy, make sure you have the right tools and processes in place to support that strategy.