How Technology Is Changing The Work We Knew – Holger Reisinger, Senior VP Large Enterprise Solutions, Jabra GN Audio A/S
that many organizations are considering extended work from home for the roles that allow it. And many will need to, as concepts like Cushman and Wakefield’s “6ft office” lower office capacities, and companies shed an estimated quarter of their realestate footprints to save costs. A Gartner study found that even if our productivity drops 5% from home, businesses can still save 20% through reducing their office spaces. But there are downsides too. When our office is in our living room, we have a harder time switching off. Recent server analysis indicates that we’re working more than 3 hours longer each day, while loneliness and boredom are increasing through isolated work.
What is clear is that as we phase in a return to work with rotated and reduced workforces, technology will bear the weight of maintaining flexible and continuous business. Bringing people back into the office helps maintain a strong connection, building confidence and engagement. And where remote workers benefit from productivity gains, they are challenged in collaborative efficiency, with creativity, problem solving and innovation paying the price. For this reason, Steve Jobs advocated office work to foster the ideas arising from chance encounters and corridor moments.
State by state, politics and industry differences will see each organization returning to work differently, but the phased return will involve rotated workforces for most. Slack’s SVP of People, Robby Kwok explains how “it’s easier to manage a company that is 100 percent remote than one where employees are 50 percent remote and 50 percent in the office.” This is where technology fundamentals come into play. When you deploy hundreds or thousands of devices to your employees to effectively concentrate, communicate and collaborate remotely, managing them is critical. Logging and monitoring capacities are key as you manage these endpoints that can give you insights and a virtual dashboard of your teams. Forming a critical component of a larger and more connected virtual office, being able to manage devices like laptops and headsets can help you identify the call quality issues that impact collaboration, as well as environmental stressors taking a toll on employee productivity. In the future, sentiment analysis can also help to track and manage stress levels for remote workers.
Beyond these remote functionalities, headsets are the only body-worn technology employees use, becoming central gateways to controlling smart contactless buildings in the future of office work. As the internet of things and connected workplaces improve, employees can invoke their voice assistants to start meetings, control lifts, search for available rooms or even make coffee without the touch of a button. Combined with gesture control functionality from meeting-rooms cameras, connected workspaces will require far less contact as health-safety concerns prevail. Headsets can also act as proximity sensors to help maintain social distancing guidelines in the office, while 180° meeting room cameras give teams safe distance collaboration, while remaining inclusive.
Ultimately, the complexity in differences across industries means that there is no onesize-fits-all approach, and organizations will individually use the coming months as a testing ground for what works. What we do know though, is that we have reached the tipping point, and managers or organizations who revert to old systems will face bigger challenges than those who use technology to hybridize their human capital and organizational processes. The coming 12-18 months will be one of blended and rotated workforces, where the Jobs-era corridor and watercooler moments will be newly regulated, but the challenges of permanent isolation remain a force to be reckoned with.
Technology, whether consciously or subconsciously, will be a powerful player in all of this. It will push the needle in the development of new cultures and behaviours in our workforce, virtually bring us together, manage our workflows and enable more hygienic offices. As voice and gestures fuel contactless smart offices, as well as more natural virtual collaboration and remote work, our devices will become more than just gateways for voice or video. Rather, they will function as the glue that enable flexible distributed teams, business continuity and the connections that fuel culture across every organization. ■