5 Emerging Digital Workplace Trends

The digital workplace is advancing at a rapid rate, and new tools promise to optimize collaboration and workflows in ways that will reshape how businesses operate.

Every workplace is digital to some degree, but understanding digital workplace trends and how they can be applied to today’s workforce can be challenging. Below are five emerging trends that are proving to boost productivity and employee satisfaction among early adopters.

1. Intelligent Assistants

A few years from now, it’s unlikely that you’ll still be scheduling your own meetings. In fact, much of your daily grunt work like booking travel, making reservations, paying bills, or even having to tap on a screen to access your apps will likely be in the virtual hands of your Intelligent Assistant (IA). IAs learn from user patterns, and the tasks and services they provide are based on user-input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from online sources.

IAs like Siri, Google Now and Alexa are becoming increasingly popular in the consumer space and are showing great promise for the digital workplace as well. With a simple voice request, they can perform a multitude of functions including reading emails and texts out loud, booking travel plans, and paying bills just to name a few. A leader in email scheduling, x.ai, provides an IA that can schedule meetings, set reminders, work in multiple time zones and more.

Having an IA perform these simple tasks saves hours per week, allowing users to focus on more important tasks. Although IAs require some enhancements before we can consider them true assistants, early adopters in the enterprise space claim they are expected to scale exponentially in the coming years.

2. The Anywhere Office

Why go to work, when work can come to you? Thanks to the ever-expanding market of mobile-first platforms, the digital workplace has become more mobile, placing less emphasis on physical offices than ever before. Mobile technology enables a real time connection to coworkers and digitally based work, providing people with the ability to work and collaborate from anywhere.

Young workers especially require flexibility in where they work, and with 70-75% of the workforce expected to be Millennials by 2025, tools to empower remote work locations are expected to increase. According to research gathered by IBM, 42.5% of the global workforce in 2017 currently has mobile capability, up from 38% just last year, and that trend is expected to continue growing.

The digital workplace is advancing at a rapid rate, and new tools promise to optimize collaboration and workflows in ways that will reshape how businesses operate.

3. Enterprise Social Platforms

Efficient collaboration is essential in the modern workplace, and enterprise social platforms enable employees to communicate and collaborate with everyone in their organization as simply as they do using their favorite social networks. The goal for enterprise solutions is providing a great user experience while simultaneously boosting productivity.

4. Smarter Email

People have been talking about the death of email for years, but for the time being email is still an essential tool. The question is no longer ‘how do we make email disappear?’ Instead it’s ‘how do we make email smarter?’

To reduce the burden of email, Google recently introduced Smart Reply. When you receive an email, Smart Reply suggests a few replies and you simply tap the one you want. Today Smart Reply already accounts for 10% of Gmail responses. Another example is Hiri, a tool ensuring people maximize productivity by becoming smarter with how they use email. We can expect to see further enhancements tailored for the digital workplace, including platforms that are able to sort, organize and even delete emails based on user-preferences.

5. An Intranet is Essential

The foundation of any digital workplace is providing employees with seamless, cohesive access to the information they need, and when and where they need it. An Intranet has evolved alongside workplace needs, and robust organizations rely on their Intranets to optimize their digital workplace.

The Intranet provides a secure space for real time communication and collaboration, allowing information to be disseminated quickly and easily. With instant access to the information they need, employees are able to remain agile, and this promotes a culture that is adaptable to change.  

In today’s marketplace, attracting and retaining great employees requires allowing workers to apply innovative technologies to their jobs. All companies must assess current digital trends while being careful to determine what is worth investing in and experimenting with. Change is constant within the digital landscape, but with each transformation comes more opportunity to communicate and collaborate more effectively than ever before.