In the modern, globally-oriented workplace, it’s not unusual for employees to work under the same business umbrella with people from different countries. The abundance of technologies takes collaboration to a whole new level: the level of productive relationships.
As a matter of fact, we are not even talking about the growing tendency towards remote work and the dispersed workforce — well, not anymore. Alex Shootman, CEO of Workfront, believes that this notion will have a different meaning over the coming years. Instead of working remotely, “people will go to work on a dynamic digital platform as a workplace.”
In the future, the question will not be about how to get the work done, managing remote teams. The focus will lie on the desired qualities that presuppose continuous training and reskilling, the ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance, rethinking waterfall careers in favor of talent mobility within a company, and redefining the roles of leadership. The goal will be to create a working environment that fosters collaboration, innovation, creativity, and lifelong development. The digital transformation of the workplace is but one way to reach this goal.
What should you know about the digital workplace?
To have a clear vision of what the digital workplace is and how it can help in reaching the above-mentioned goal, we will address this notion through its main characteristics. Hence, the digital workplace can be described in the following ways.
- It is a natural evolution from a physical workplace to an interconnected one.
Fairly recently, there has been a clear separation between work and personal life. But with mobile devices and social media becoming ubiquitous, this line gets more blurred and interrelated.
The Gallup research states that “employees are pushing employers to forgo traditional structures since new and emerging technologies are transforming the type of work employees perform, as well as where and how work gets done.”
Nowadays, the workplace is far more than a space occupied by an employee during working hours. The workplace is all about the technologies people need to get work done starting from hardware equipment to cloud-based training platforms, HR software, and collaboration tools like Slack and Google Hangouts.
