The world jumped ten feet in a strange direction. We’re being asked to jump right along with it. Most everyone has accepted that the world has changed, but what does that mean for how people work? Remote work,hybrid work, in-person work… organizations are navigating these complexities and realizing that the technology stack needed in this new world will be all new.
Or will it?
Even before COVID, many organizations offered some level of remote/in-office work combo. Many future-of-work technology providers saw these trends coming and designed or redesigned their software to accommodate our changing world.
What is the future of the office, for example? Workers used the office for everything. But where did the office really shine? It facilitated the ease of connection, knowing who to go to for what, and served as a place for workplace roots – however temporary those roots may be.
What is the future of the home office? Similarly, we can ask ourselves what the home office does best: It (theoretically) gives you an easy-to-access, quiet, always available place to get desk work done.
What is the future of workplace logistics and automation? Workplace Tech vendors have been contemplating this for quite a while too – long before COVID. Why are Robotic Process Automation companies taking off? Why are existing vendors doubling-down on automating away the hum-drum boring tasks that no one wants to do?
What about ways to figure out what your workforce needs? How can we predict the future of work, before the future is here? Again, people analytics organizations jumped on this trend years ago… long before COVID. They did so because anticipating what will help workers engage and perform their best – and predicting the future of your OWN workforce – improves retention,reduces absenteeism, and increases metrics like revenue per employee. Who doesn’t want that?
COVID may have accelerated workplace change, but paying attention to those who predicted the future of work BEFORE COVID may be the ones to listen to now. They are already looking over the horizon to the NEXT big disruption. The “new” ways of working aren’t really all that new to them,and they’d probably be more than happy to share what really IS new.
Let’s keep looking over the horizon; there’s some great work to be done.