by Mr. Johnson Varkey
The world today looks extremely different from the one we experienced two years back. Remote working is the default option today, and the future of work looks extremely different from the one we had before. The key changes that are seen over the last 2 years can largely be bucketed into the following 4 areas:
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Safe and Efficient Workplaces.
Employees too expect an office environment where their safety is assured. This is corroborated by the 2020 Intelligent Workplace Report ‘Shaping Employee Experiences for a World Transformed’, which highlights that employee needs will be at the heart of the future workplace design.
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Ability to communicate and collaborate across locations in person and virtually to increase productivity and efficiency.
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Ability to work from any location across any device in a secure manner.
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Analytics to measure and improve utilization & security.
Let us now look at the key steps that can be taken to design an intelligent workplace.
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Safe & Efficient Workplace
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First and foremost, the office must be redesigned keeping in mind safety precautions. This is important as employees have to be confident about returning back to the office.
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Various factors for a safe working environment range from:
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Optimum seat booking & occupancy.
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From checking body temperature.
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Safe social distancing between employees.
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Contact Tracing.
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Today, technology can help enterprises do this easily and even alert the administration or management of any employees who are not wearing a mask within the office premises. AI-enabled smart cameras can detect policy violations and ensure that the required safety norms are followed and adhered to.
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As many local government authorities have made it mandatory for businesses to report the actual number of people present physically on any given day, smart cameras can help in automatically counting the number of people and ensuring compliance with laws, as applicable.
With flexible working arrangements, the future workspaces will have to be redesigned in a way that it gives organizations the flexibility to increase or reduce the office environment.
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This will entail organizations making use of space reservation systems which measure availability of space in real-time using sensors. This will help organizations to dynamically allocate and release space, which is well suited for flexible working models.
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Using heat-maps and real-time occupancy data, organizations can monitor the usage of all occupied spaces and take decisions to maximize occupancy and reduce costs.
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Enterprises must also offer employees the option of hot desking, which allows employees to start working in any of the spaces they want.
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Today, technology solutions are also available which allow employees to reserve their spaces from their smartphones through mobile aps.
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Making presentations will also be extremely easy in the new intelligent workspace, as wireless presentation modes will make it easy for employees or other stakeholders to present over a network, with no need of physical connectivity and the ability to present from any device.
Ability to work from any location across any device in a secure manner.
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From a collaboration perspective, it is also critically important to use cloud-based services as far as possible. Today, services such as business calling, meetings and other contact center services can be made possible using a cloud-based collaboration system.
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This helps in reducing silos and enables a rich collaboration experience by allowing different types of devices to integrate and interoperate. Employees or other stakeholders can make high-definition audio and video calls from any location – their office, home or any other remote location. Sharing of screens, files or any message can be done, and real-time collaboration can be done using a whiteboard.
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These capabilities can give enterprises the speed and scale to accelerate their collaboration initiatives. If leveraged well, this can enable enterprises to achieve the full potential of virtual teams, that can be geographically be situated anywhere in the world.
Ability to work from any location across any device in a secure manner.
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The ability to access application and enterprise data in a secure manner using the device of convenience is also key to productivity.
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Since many employees are currently remote and good percentage will continue to be remote this becomes a key requirement for enterprises to secure their corporate and customer information.
Analytics to measure and improve utilization & security.
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To ensure high productivity, enterprises can also look at using AI-based advanced analytics that helps them uncover workplace insights to better understand user needs and behavior.
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Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the traditional barometer for measuring the success of any service-led initiative, has to transition to Experience-Led Agreements (XLAs). For example, in addition to the standard KPIs such as uptime or time-to-ticket resolution, it is also equally important to measure the user experience in a workplace.
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For example, what is the time taken to onboard employees with the required credentials to make them productive within a short period of time? What is the time taken for a remote employee to login to an application to complete a specific task? XLAs help enterprises get a measure of user satisfaction beyond standard or traditional methods such as employee surveys.
The COVID-19 pandemic, while tragic, is also an opportunity for enterprises to rethink their workplace strategies. If enterprises can create intelligent workspaces that enable employees to give their best, they will have a distinct and competitive advantage over other companies for attracting talent.
(Author- Mr. Johnson Varkey, Sales Director – Intelligent Workplace, NTT Ltd. In India)
