For the last 18 months, we’ve all had to quickly adapt to the ways in which we communicate with our colleagues and with our clients.
Through the learnings of working from home and the demands for existing toolsets to evolve, true hybrid collaboration became a reality during the pandemic, forcing change within the unified communication and collaboration industry. The rate of innovation has accelerated at a pace faster than we ever saw in the world we knew as “normal”. Change has once again been brought upon us to adapt to a mixed way of working now that offices re-open their doors to employees and we’ve proved we can work anywhere. The “next normal” is on the horizon.
No going back
Whilst some organisations evolve from a five-day week in the office to perhaps never returning and digitising their distributed workforce, there are many that will embrace hybrid work and have their workforce mixing their days between home and the office. The future of work carries the responsibility to keep employee morale high and, most of all, take advantage of the ubiquitous customers that are also facing these changes. AVI-SPL brings knowledge, expertise, and awareness to our customers to ensure they understand the importance of reciprocal working for their employees and empower those who are at the frontline of their customers, keeping business doing its business.
Five Trends That Are Influencing the Future of Work
AVI-SPL is experienced in delivering sound advice, strategy to UCC decisions, and assessing the current stance of your business when it comes to communications, productivity, and collaboration. Here are five trends that are shaping the future of work:
- Meeting simplification
Organisations have employees that are “know it all” when it comes to meetings. They have now adopted not just one meeting platform, but several that, depending on the use case, could be for internal communication or for outreach to customers. Whatever platform is used, ensuring the simplification of joining these meetings at home or in the meeting room is critical for productivity. If we have seen meeting fatigue reveal itself when working at home, it will likely exist in the office. Putting your employees through complex processes to book and join meetings at the office and to use meeting spaces will hinder the eagerness to work at the office. And ultimately they’ll be reluctant to use your meeting room facilities.
- Demonstrating digital nativity
Many consider providing communication to all and from anywhere. The Gartner report on “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021: Anywhere Operations,” highlights making digital and remote the default delivery model. You may think that this is already a reality – which it is and rightly so, having been dictated to us by circumstances and by employees in the organisation. What organisations need to consider is keeping this process fluid, allowing agnostic connectivity on any device and from anywhere. Remember that users will take the path of least resistance. Keep the consistency in the office.
- Video is critical
As the workplace demographic transitions into the X’s, Millennials, and the Z’s, the importance of video communication quality, agility, and overall experience is paramount. Organisations are obligated to provide adequate tools as well as technologies they need to communicate and offer customer value to those engagements. Video has been the greatest tool yet for the “next normal,” and while we may think seeing someone on the screen is more than enough, it needs to bring inclusivity and equality to those in the office, at home, or on the go.
- Scalability and Security
Organisations have had a long battle to ensure their video communications are flexible. AVI-SPL believes value is realised over time rather than in those early days of deploying the golden unified communication and collaboration strategy. Being scalable comes from a cloud-first strategy, not only from a support point of view but for your budget, too. Cloud unlocks a multitude of values; scalability is one of them for sure, but another is the continuous evolution of security requirements. New threats are among us on a day-by-day basis, so keeping your video communications secure as well as those meetings need to be top of mind.
- Interoperability
There is no silver bullet to a one-size-fits-all. Like we noted above, organisations have multiple platforms for video communication and collaboration. You may think you have checked that box to support all communication needs to align to your native video strategy, but we should keep in mind there are customers to support. Every organisation has a different approach to providing video technologies, and if we don’t consider working with those, that places a roadblock in front of employees to expand that customer value. Ensuring you can support big platform players out there and offer congruity will keep productivity and business-to-customer congruity.
