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The dramatic shift toward hybrid work prompted by the pandemic has been more than just a physical reshuffling of where people work; it has also upended how people collaborate on the job. Increasingly, success in today’s modern workplace is defined by how well employees can access and share information from anywhere, across all devices, without friction. Achieving this success requires organizations to not only deploy collaboration tools effectively, but also streamline the path to adoption so employees can put these tools to optimal use in their day-to-day work.
The Modern Workplace is Everywhere…and Ever-Evolving
The modern workplace has radically transformed in the post-pandemic era, where the “office” can now be anywhere – from employees’ homes and coffee shops, to cars, park benches and anywhere a mobile device or hotspot can create a digital workspace. The IT team’s job is to enable this flexibility while ensuring neither collaboration nor security are negatively impacted.
Fulfilling this mandate is easier said than done. While the early stages of the remote work revolution were founded on basic capabilities like video conferencing, truly effective collaboration has required ongoing development and adoption of more technologies in the workforce. Each time new features, functionality, AI/ML driven tools and other advancements roll out on platforms like Microsoft Teams, messaging apps, project management software and other tools, there’s a potential adoption curve for employees.
As the continual rollout of new collaboration tools and capabilities becomes the norm, the affected workforce needs support in quickly adjusting to new processes and workflow habits. To better manage this cycle of enhanced workplace tools and subsequent workforce adoption, organizations should focus on strategies to streamline and accelerate the adoption curve.
Optimizing Modern Collaboration in the Modern Workplace
Creating seamless and secure collaboration in the modern workplace involves a lot more than just flipping a switch on new capabilities and sending out a memo to staff. It’s important to back up these modernization efforts with the right strategies, tools and change management programs. Many organizations start by developing user archetypes, or personas, to understand which applications employees are using, how they’re using them and what technology and devices they’re using to access those applications. These personas help the organization better optimize system availability and potentially eliminate redundant or unnecessary applications.
A similar mindset should be applied to the underlying data itself, what we call a “Know Your Data” approach to identifying the nature, criticality, location, and accessibility of data. Clarifying these attributes allows the organization to better secure company data and systems without impacting users’ productivity. It’s also vitally important for implementing security parameters around the most sensitive types of data, especially for organizations that have a lot of data being passed between remote locations.
These efforts should be augmented with a proactive and comprehensive program for employee engagement and change management to effectively communicate the benefits of new capabilities and platforms to all employees. The user personas, in particular, can help with orienting certain employees to certain new tools and processes. Wherever possible, workforce surveys and other feedback loops should be established so users can contribute insights from their hands-on experience with newly-deployed collaboration tools and their emerging use cases in the business.
Throughout, the tone for this virtuous cycle of new collaboration tools quickly put to use by a receptive and increasingly productive workforce must be established and reinforced from the very top of the org chart. C-suite leaders should not only communicate the benefits of innovation to employees; they must lead by example but using and evangelizing new collaboration platforms and tools. This ensures users remain inspired and engaged in an organization’s ongoing technology evolution, and thereby more likely to embrace new collaboration tools and quickly adopt them as they get deployed in the organization.
