Intelligent Workplace: 2020 technology trends

The rise of the modern collaboration estate

Employee experience takes center stage as organizations look to bring collaboration and productivity tools together on one platform.

While we still talk about work–life balance, there’s an increasing blend of the two as work becomes more closely linked to our individual purpose, achievement and even wellbeing. Today’s employees want to be measured on their contribution and outcomes, not the hours they clock up. They expect the organizations they work for to give them the freedom, flexibility and tools to do what they love, and do it well.

But there’s been a disconnect between the powerful, user-friendly tools people use in their personal lives – smartphones, messaging and file-sharing applications like WhatsApp and Dropbox – and the somewhat limited, mostly unintegrated, tools available ‘at the office’.

As organizations compete to attract the right talent through the company’s sustainability message and modern collaboration systems, it’s HR rather than IT that’s driving digital workplace initiatives.

Accelerate your move to a single collaboration platform

The modern collaboration estate bridges these gaps by bringing together unified communications and productivity systems in the same estate. With telephony, messaging, videoconferencing, Office365 and GSuite on the same platform, it’s easier to deliver the experience employees expect.

54% of participants recognize the high importance of transforming the employee experience, and the ways people perform their jobs, through digital initiatives.

The dual role of smart buildings

Smart buildings are being designed with both environmental sustainability and employee happiness in mind.

Workspace design has evolved to consider employee wellbeing and productivity alongside factors such as reducing running costs and minimizing environmental impact.

Activity-based environments are being designed with several factors in mind, first and foremost being the needs and preferences of people who use them. Think workspaces with private rooms for calls, coffee stations for recharging and connecting, and meeting rooms with interactive whiteboards.

Smart buildings will run on the Internet of Everything, where technology is used to make people more comfortable – for example, by adjusting temperatures, lighting and even aromas to suit individual preferences. Sentiment analysis can measure how employees are really feeling and assist with human capital management.

Design spaces that make employees happy

To optimize the use of space for maximum impact on positivity and productivity, get employee input into every aspect of design, from the look and feel of the spaces to the names of meeting rooms. Address any concerns about the use of data captured by IoT sensors. Such data should either be anonymized to show broad trends or used for the purposes of adapting the environment to individual preferences – not as a management tool for analysing productivity.

The top two strategies for meeting evolving workforce demands are flexible working (56.6%) and workspace environment (52.8%).

Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report

The effectiveness of the data-driven organization

With humans working alongside machines, the way organizations visualize and use data will be key to successful outcomes.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, anything that can be automated, will be. Humans will get involved only when machines can’t understand the context of a situation well enough to answer a query or resolve a customer problem.

Natural-language processing will be used in the first steps of a client interaction, while machine learning will analyse sentiments and preferences and direct customers appropriately. Robotic process automation will identify issues and either address them directly or alert a human to intervene.

Creating the ideal combination between what a machine does and what a human does will be critical. And the foundation of all of this is how you use the data you have throughout the customer journey.

Implement artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate opportunities

To become an effective, data-driven organization, start with the business problem then work down to the technology: where can artificial intelligence and machine learning automate processes, improve the customer experience and make life easier for employees?

Automation will replace between 11% and 25% of CX-led activity currently performed by agents by 2020, say 32.7% of organizations.

Dimension Data 2019 Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report