Thanks to the advent of mobile technology and ubiquitous Internet access, an increasing number of people now work outside of the office one or more days per week.1 The shift also means that companies can more easily assemble a global workforce, integrating team members from multiple locations and time zones. These changes have the potential to increase innovation, productivity, and employee satisfaction while lowering costs for employers — but only if we adjust our processes and technologies accordingly.
We've identified six new realities about the state of today's workplace that business leaders must recognize and manage in order to reap the benefits of today's modern work styles. Once you've read through these, learn more about how the Prysm Visual Workspace can help your company transform the way you work.
REALITY #1: Employee disengagement is a disease
Studies show that up to 87% of employees worldwide — nearly nine out of 10 — are checked out, having long since lost motivation and interest in their jobs. The financial toll of this lost productivity is staggering: US employers lose between $450 and $550 billion a year to employee disengagement.2
REALITY #2: Meetings have lost their mojo
Look around the conference room. How many meeting participants are leaning in, actively engaged? How many are glassy-eyed, staring into space or tapping on their phones? What about the meeting participants you *can't* see, because they're remote and connected via video or audio conference? Chances are, they're even more checked out.
REALITY #3: Outdated tech is productivity's poison pill
Studies — such as "Digital, Disparate, and Disengaged, "1 conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Prysm — show that outdated technology is a major factor in employee disengagement and "meeting zombie" syndrome. Remote participants often are not connected visually. Even if they are, chances are that they can see little more than a PowerPoint presentation (yawn). What's more, there's no effective way to save the results of a group brainstorm or problem-solving session. As a result, decisions are often forgotten and projects waylaid. Talk about wasted energy!
REALITY #4: The most productive employees wear pajamas
This reality is a conundrum. Two-thirds of employers report that their telecommuters are more productive than their in-office employees. And one out of three employees reports that if they had a choice between the option to work from home and a pay raise, they'd choose the former. Considering these facts, it's easy to see why employers might want to encourage employees to work outside the office one or more days per week. But how do we reconcile this, given the first two realities outlined above? If employees are already disengaged and if our technology is not helping matters, then what? It's definitely time for new solutions.
REALITY #5: Rapid innovation requires a Silicon Valley mindset
Seventy-two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs say the rapid pace of innovation is their company’s number-one challenge.3 The business world has become a very fast-moving place. If your company can't keep pace, it may well lose to more agile competitors. To foster an atmosphere of innovation, forward-thinking employers often create multidisciplinary teams that can work together to solve problems and move the needle forward. No problem, except...what if the best team includes members from different locations? And if a company's technology isn't conducive to collaboration amongst distributed team members, what then? The moral of the story is definitely "change or die."
REALITY #6: Decision-makers are cynics about analytics
The age of Big Data is upon us, and with good reason: it provides critical insights that make or break businesses. Major insurers are predicting fraud in advance. Giant online retailers, like Amazon, are able to analyze a constant influx of data from across the web in order to adjust prices and inventory in real-time, a practice that confers enormous competitive advantage. The problem is that to make good decisions, we must often integrate and compare data from multiple sources simultaneously. Imagine flipping back and forth between several Excel spreadsheets and a couple of charts and graphs. Now imagine that you're working with a remote team and you all need to be able to visualize these different sources together. It's a big hurdle. In fact, according to an SAP study,4 workers using data-visualization tools estimate it would take an average of nine hours or longer to see trends and correlations in their company’s data than it would without data visualization.
Which of these realities is disrupting your day?
The common denominator across these workplace realities is the need for better ways to work together and share information. The workplace itself has become a platform for exchange, but the solutions to enable collaboration are inefficient and outdated. Prysm Visual Workplace is helping companies address the six realities discussed above by delivering a seamless collaboration platform that unifies content and applications with modern digital workplace technology to ignite teams, whether they are in the office or on the road, and accelerate decisions that matter.
Learn more about how Prysm Visual Workplace can transform your workplace today.
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1"Digital, Disparate, And Disengaged: Bridging The Gap Between In-Office And Remote Workers,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Prysm, June 2016
2“The Engaged Workplace,” Gallup
32015 Fortune 500 CEO Survey, Fortune.com
4SAP / Wakefield Research study
