The future of the workplace is happening now – are you ready for it?
July 12, 2021
July 12, 2021
The explosion of digital technology adoption that followed the outbreak of COVID-19 has accelerated many firms’ migration to cloud-based collaboration. With offices and other workplaces closed, demand for virtual collaboration tools soared as workers and employers sought to maintain productivity in a distributed workforce.
What’s now clear is that while this change may have been born of short-term necessity, it’s likely here to stay – even when COVID is a memory. There are three main reasons why:
A hybrid workplace of the future is emerging now. For many companies, it is already here. In this new hybrid world where physical and virtual collaboration meet, we predict cloud-based services will become the tools of choice.
As this happens, the tools themselves will become competitive differentiators, making it increasingly important for enterprises to invest in future-proof technologies that unlock the full power of the cloud. Enterprises will likely face pressure to focus on the employee experience to ensure that all workers have the tools and support they need – regardless of whether they’re working at home, in the office, or a bit of both.
For enterprises looking to invest in cloud-based collaboration tools that will give them an edge in terms of productivity and employee engagement – today and in the future – there are six capabilities to look out for. In no particular order, these are:
“Businesses I talk to want to collaborate in more seamless and efficient ways. Google Workspace is born in the cloud and so allows for frictionless collaboration, rather than solutions with bolted on features and multiple legacy tools. Workspace is available to organisations of all shapes and sizes and has everything you need to get anything done, all in one place.”
- Daniel Middleton, UK Google Workspace Lead at Google Cloud
“The best collaborative tools are underpinned by enterprise-wide data and app modernisation and are brought together in the cloud. They are at the front end of a broader transformation journey that will allow businesses to move with agility, innovate at speed and outperform their competitors. What’s important is that firms work with the right partners to workshop a broad cloud strategy that starts with data and app modernisation and ends with world class collaboration.”
- Asser Elghoneimi, Digital Workplace Transformation Manager at Accenture
Cloud collaboration is just one part of a company’s cloud ecosystem. To derive the maximum benefit from cloud collaboration tools, businesses need to think strategically about the challenges they want to address through the tools and how cloud infrastructure, data and applications can be combined to deliver against these challenges.
It’s therefore important to identify the business benefits that can be unlocked by collaborative culture, including cost efficiency, improved productivity, and smarter working, and to understand how your organisational and team structures can evolve in highly collaborative environments. Here the choice of cloud partners is important.
Ideally you want to work with organisations that can help plan your journey to more collaborative working and which bring to the table assets and accelerators to support your cloud design, including data migration tools and services, standardised delivery methodology, reusable apps, and subject matter experts. The more business and technical input you have into your collaboration design the more likely it will succeed, which why initiatives like Cloud Design from Accenture and Google Cloud have an important role to play.
With the right approach, cloud collaboration tools will become the user interface of the transformed enterprise, connecting people to the colleagues, documents, files, apps and data they need to thrive.
COVID-19 has undoubtedly kickstarted the workplace revolution currently underway, but much more change lies ahead. Businesses that invest in the right tools and partnerships, and see collaboration as part of a broader cloud- and digital-transformation journey will be best placed to increase productivity, employee engagement and, ultimately, growth.