How to use collaboration to your advantage

The pandemic has changed both the way we work and how we think about work as part of our broader human experience. Employees want to be recognized as individuals and not as resources – which means companies need to prioritize their well-being and work-life balance. Our experience shows that leaders, managers and employees often have very different views on what the future of work should look like – and how to enable it. Forward-thinking organizations have safely driven digital transformation from the ground up to enable frontline, hybrid, and remote workers to work safely and productively—and those who do well are rewarded significantly.

Changing employee needs

The employee experience has completely transformed, and the way employees perceive and think about the company, based on their individual and cumulative interactions with customers, executives, colleagues and the wider work environment – is not yet a strategic differentiator for many. Those who have evolved and tweaked their workplace strategies are far happier with their current EX ability. A focus on employee experience and wellbeing can deliver tangible results, particularly in improving work-life balance, employee wellbeing, overall productivity and business growth.

Most companies need to increase their efforts in the areas of technology empowerment, employee engagement and wellbeing. Analyzing data across the “Three Ws” – work, workforce and workspaces – will provide insight into where changes and improvements are needed to create moments that matter to employees.

Provide the right collaboration tools

Technology dependency is increasing, but internal capabilities to optimize these technologies are scarce. Without the right skills to implement and support technologies that extend EX and CX, customer satisfaction decreases—and with it, sales and profits.

As organizations reassess policies in the face of changing work styles, technology must support a range of employee profiles and work location preferences. Data from a 2021 report suggests a broad “30-30-30” split — given a choice, about 30% of employees would prefer to work remotely, 30% would prefer to work remotely, and 30% would want to switch between the two. From an organizational perspective, therefore, wherever your employees and customers are located in the world, whatever device and platform they use to collaborate and communicate with others, the technology must be in place to streamline and optimize productivity across the hybrid workplace .

Use the potential of the cloud

The focus must be on creating a modern workplace everywhere with digital collaboration tools. Organizations need to use cloud-based collaboration tools to ensure that the essential and critical needs of business calling, collaboration and contact center functionality are adequately met. A cloud-based collaboration tool also gives organizations the added benefit of not having to worry about the upfront investment or complexity of managing a collaboration systems infrastructure. This can help companies create rich collaboration experiences with full integration with third-party call clients. In the context of a globally distributed workforce, a rich collaboration environment helps organizations realize the full potential of virtual teams, where team members can be located anywhere in the world.

The power of workplace analytics

Beyond the tech tools needed, organizations need to look more fully at how to support employees to work from home. In this aspect, workplace analytics can play a role in assisting organizations in gathering, analyzing, organizing and sharing knowledge across the distributed enterprise. With Workplace Analytics technology, you can collect more detailed data than ever about your employees and how and when they work (and not just where they work). For example, you can understand: How much time do people or teams spend in meetings? volume and frequency of email and chat exchanges; Anyone who regularly works overtime, weekends, or logs in late at night to reply to messages; The nature, frequency and effectiveness of employees’ interactions with their line managers, etc.

These insights can be used by both IT and HR teams to identify areas for improvement and investment. And because the process of data collection is continuous, you can reevaluate your workplace every few months and establish a cycle of continuous improvement. Rather than providing a point-in-time view of employee sentiment, it is possible to provide richer, more contextual and timely insights. These solutions allow you to create and distribute short, targeted, and highly customized Snap polls to departments or teams on a daily or weekly basis. Best of all, they automate all the time and effort involved in collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing the feedback you receive. You can then use these insights as input for the decisions and investments you make in your technology, HR policies, and any other areas that need improvement.

The best workplace analytics results are achieved when a company aligns its integrations with the core business systems (HR platforms, sales platforms, etc.). For example, by integrating your Workplace Analytics solution with your sales CRM and Collaboration Cloud, you can ensure that the time and effort your sales reps spend on customer-facing meetings and emails matches the revenue you generate from them Customers.

In a highly competitive market, good talent is in high demand, and with more companies offering remote jobs, people now have more choices about where, how and for whom they want to work. By applying some of the recommendations suggested above, we believe that organizations can respond to these changing priorities by providing a greater degree of employee choice and flexibility and are in a better position to attract talented people to lead the marketplace to win.

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