Organizing the Future of Hybrid Work

Where do we begin?

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, everyone was thrown into a whirlwind of a mess moving all work processes into a remote work environment. As quarantine season and stay-home notices surged, so did the urgency to adapt and support day-to-day operations. It became most crucial when the pandemic took a turn for the worst in mid-2020. Teams and organizations were struggling to figure out which specific tools (and what combination of tools at that) should they subscribe to to keep business-as-usual, or at least try their best to.

We view the world of software becoming increasingly chaotic, software has chewed us up, spat us out, and is no longer eating up the world. Pre-covid, our team worked on multiple projects and our software stack is ubiquitous with any other startup’s — Trello for task management, Slack for communication, Google Calendar for scheduling, amongst the few others we use to keep our team on the same page. Control over business-critical processes were at our fingertips and accessible wherever we were, at the palm of our hands.

In ‘Organizing the Future of Hybrid Work’, we explore three areas of interest when it comes to the future of work:

• Pain points faced by organizations and their users
• Traditional solutions and why they work only for some organizations
• Why standardization and low-code or no-code internal tool alternatives are likely to flourish

Do users really want an all-in-one workspace?

During the pandemic, some friends and colleagues of ours shared their functional workflows, and others even wrote about their favourite software stack they have adapted even pre-Covid. We’ve seen the accelerated shift for larger organizations such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft onboarding companies onto their respective ‘workspace’ software, many of which they still continue to use today. Is it enough, though?

During the pandemic, we surveyed 230 respondents and published our findings on employees’ productivity levels and team engagement in a hybrid work environment. The objective was to find out exactly how these teams adapt to the pandemic and thus a remote work environment, and what they did to continue to engage with their team. Our target audience is specific. We sought out mainly employees and founders of startups and Small-Medium Enterprise Teams (SMEs).

Our findings at a glance

• Average team size: 8
• Age range of respondents: 22 to 35
• Majority of the interviewees work in the technology industry
• Eight in ten respondents report using multiple platforms to manage their teams, ranging from communication apps like Slack and Telegram to productivity software like Trello, Asana, and Jira
• Users access multiple platforms on a day-to-day basis: The most popular ones include Slack, Dropbox, Jira, Hubspot, Airtable, Asana, and Zoom
• Those who are not permanently in a team and those who are from Baby Boomers and Gen X (greatest generation; salt of the earth) prefer for tasks to be assigned to them directly on a communication platform
• Non-users absolutely detest steep learning curves for any given productivity software

The most commonly cited challenge was to keep track of all information across multiple platforms due to a lack of alignment for internal communications and constant context switching (think alt + tab every three seconds).

The only difference between the different platforms, with all of its merits, is the learning curve for users to embark on it, and use it as-is which is not the case when it comes to multiple platforms.

The white elephant in the room

It almost seems like there is an elephant in the room that is yet to be addressed. Every day we are seeing new software and apps launched that promise a solution towards increased productivity, greater connectivity within teams. It results in one of two scenarios; (1) Steep learning curves for never-before-used software, and (2) incompatibility to current workflows to incorporate within the team’s software stack.

Let’s say we stumbled upon a tool that can integrate across all your communication channels — but for each integration, functionality is limited. Or perhaps we found a tool that can automate our workflows, but only one workflow automation step at a time. Here’s the white elephant — these new tools that are sprouting up every day, it doesn’t always work — and when it does, users are taking an unusually long time to learn and perform the tasks that the software was intended for.

Scenario: If a software stack comprises 10 different software, new employees will have to figure out where the information is stored, locate the right software that can achieve the tasks assigned to them, and ensure timely updates throughout the team.

This creates greater chaos especially when users take up to 60 minutes to seek out the right information “trapped in different apps”, resulting in more complex tasks and workflows.

Moreover, employees work with their current stack to achieve the company’s business objectives. With all enterprises alike, it is easy to assume that operations work like clockwork. The truth of the matter is that without coordination and open communication channels, tasks visibility across the team, and even across the whole organisation can be limited.

Statista reported a 3% decrease in profit per employee in professional services since the world nosedived into the pandemic.

At first glance, this may not seem a lot but collectively, it has cost companies globally billions of dollars resulting in a significant impact on their bottom line.

Do API integrations really work?

Everyone more or less has slowly adapted to the whole idea of hybrid work by now. Schools have adopted Google Classroom and virtual whiteboards for lessons. E-commerce has indubitably made life easier for shopping for groceries and date-night dinners. Work is no exception. Most around the world are still working remotely, or in a hybrid work environment at the least, where the blurring of work-life boundaries continues to subsist.

Integrations in the software stack does very little to mitigate this. Given that the team adopts a particular software stack, integrations revolving around some software stacks tend to fail. With so many productivity software tools thrown into the fray — Zone included — numerous API integrations need to be introduced into the mix. Even then, as teams adopt a greater number of API integrations to simplify workflows, they may not function as well as expected.

From a technical perspective, unless there are more acquisitions like that of Slack by Salesforce, the integration is hardly ever seamless. To minimize chaos in a software stack simply requires everyone on the team to write snippets of code to ensure it works, and not just for one, but for all. An assigned individual or a team needs to ensure the code is in order and at all times, meaning additional responsibilities for that of the technical team of any organization or startup.

What’s left for the future of work

Not all is lost. For organizations to veer away from chaos altogether and mitigate these impending chaos, we examine emerging trends in the space of productivity and workflow management solutions. we look at how best to achieve a much more connected workspace than ever before. Automation and artificial intelligence have taken the lead in most productivity software but were fundamentally built differently. There are a ton of mundane tasks that we could (and should) outsource to machines but it will require human supervision and heuristics to ensure tasks proceed correctly as they should.

The standardisation of code (and APIs) is a first step in the right direction to ensure seamless integration into any software. The problem arises when there are various platforms offering the same integrations with different user interfaces and experiences. It may not be apparent to everyone, but it is incredibly challenging to build just one solution that is perceived as familiar and easy to use.

Leverage API Integrations with a single interface and experience

To eliminate confusion and bring everything in a software stack together, a single user interface and experience is necessary. End users from each company should only learn to use just one system or one common user interface, with all other external tools and applications integrated as APIs. For example, the interface in which users schedule an appointment on Calendly, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams could be standardized to ensure that users can perform the task, ie. scheduling, with the same, familiar interface, and not stopping there. Automation within the same interface can then be achieved to allow for seamless one-click completion of tasks on a single internal tool.

The internal tool can be built by the organization or one that can be integrated with all required APIs. This should then serve the organization well in its needs and remain robust in the long term, supporting all integrated APIs. While there is a wide selection of such internal tools such as Qatalog, pricing also comes to mind. Depending on the size of the team, a subscription model is still the most popular business model today. It may however be unfriendly towards smaller teams and organisations.

The era of cloud is the herald of a pay-per-usage model, where instead of a gym yearly membership fee for example, one pays for each entry into the gym.

This gives greater affordability to small and medium teams looking to optimize the cost of internal tools and its peripherals. That said, a complete suite of API integrations hardly exists on a single platform that is publicly available. There may be less well-known APIs and apps that can be supported by publicly available internal tools, and with new apps sprouting out each and every day, it is almost impossible to have all of these apps integrated. Usually, a request will need to be sent in for a particular API or app to be included in the mix which often takes time and comes at a cost as well.

Low-code alternatives

The trend of low-code and no-code platforms is rising. Custom themes and templates are made available to paying customers on Shopify, Webflow for webpage creation, and Kissflow for workflow automations. Internal tools that allow for low-code customization can capture a market that has yet to be properly defined. In an internal tool, customizable themes and templates for a single, consistent user interface and experience can be considered as the answer to simple, familiar software used by end users within each organization.

The fact is that each organization functions differently and therefore necessitates a consistent user interface and experience throughout its company staff, together with different APIs integrated to achieve business-critical functions and flows. When we focus on the user interface and experience of internal tools, standardizing this user interface and experience could mean limited customizability to corporations looking for a more tailored user interface and experience in their internal tooling solutions.

That said, a delicate trade-off between over-customizability and an adequate software stack that meets the organization’s needs is to be had when low-code alternatives enter the internal tools arena.

What’s next for the future of hybrid work

As we are recovering from post-Covid world, we have witnessed the rise and fall of many industries. It’s no wonder where the future of work will be heading towards — Organizations have adapted quickly to their choice of their software stack to keep their business-as-usual, but it isn’t enough.

With newer and more modern industries becoming the forefront of the economy, it is going to be one hell of an exciting ride to see how work continues to evolve from the traditional processes and possibly outdated software stacks.

Work is no longer just about organizations achieving their business objectives and meeting bottom line targets. It will transform into a new mindset of making work easier, being productive better, and giving end users in every organization the flexibility they need, while organizing the future of hybrid work.

This article was co-written by Goh See Ting and Ryan.

Ryan is the co-founder at Pitchspot, and is most recognised for the design of Pitchspot products, as well as spearheading the direction of the company. He’s also part of the innovation team as a consultant with one of the largest technology consultancy firms globally, Capgemini, working with clients in multiple sectors including financial services, automotive, and sustainability.

See Ting is the co-founder and CTO at Pitchspot, with more than five years in the APAC startup scene. He has built ventures ranging from e-commerce businesses to offline stores and has scaled technology startups in SaaS, and in the MedTech space.