This year’s UC EXPO was yet again another chance for our industry to showcase its vibrance, dynamism and cutting-edge technology. And it didn’t disappoint. GDPR, AI, cyber security were all big themes this year, as you’d quite rightly expect with GDPR being officially introduced to the UK this month and AI and cyber security constantly in the headlines this year.
The big winner in my eyes, however, was undoubtedly workplace collaboration and looking at how the industry is adapting to the changing demands from workers and the modern-day workplace.
There’s no doubt that the workplace is advancing to become more connected, collaborative and flexible. But, with this change comes an increasingly confused organisational hierarchy where employees are given more freedom, expected to self-manage their time and become more productive.
This is not an isolated problem for a small number of businesses. In fact, research from Timewise suggests that nearly nine in ten (87%) of the UK’s full-time workforce either currently work flexibly or would like to do so. It’s clear that remote working is causing the boundaries between work and play to shift with business hours becoming more fluid as opposed to the rigid 9 to 5 working day.
But, this trend isn’t just confined to the workplace. How people are interacting with media, information and each other is changing and we are demanding more depth and more detail at a faster pace. You can now see your doctor at the touch of a button, order online goods and take delivery within the hour and have fast, free access to rolling news coverage from digital news channels and social media. Continuous workdays and instant messaging means there’s also less time between interactions and these in turn are shorter; there’s no need to leave a long complaining review on a website when you can instantly talk to a chatbot in short, snappy sentences.
With these trends becoming increasingly mainstream, workstream collaboration – the topic of Dave Michels’ excellent session at UC EXPO – has taken off in a big way. What UC EXPO showed was you can expect to see more firms opening discussions about best practice in team collaboration to keep staff happy, engaged and productive.
All over the world, team collaboration is being mentioned more frequently as companies not only begin to realise the cost saving implications but the opportunity that collaboration, remote working and instant messaging can bring. Whilst this trend is not necessarily new, one thing was evident at UC EXPO, the voice model’s time is up and we’re migrating towards a model based on messaging.
Lots of companies have already identified this as a trend. For example, in 2011 Atos, Unify’s parent company, announced a global ‘zero email’ policy to help staff take control of their workloads and reduce the amount of time spent reading unnecessary communications. The ambitious plan worked and the company moved to messaging platforms. It instantly reported higher levels of productivity and team collaboration.
But, voice too is changing. As Michels’ talk highlighted, voice has long been the base of the technology stack and organisations have been building layer upon layer on top of this base for years. But, with the increased demand for messaging platforms that base needs to change with new, cloud-based and highly integrated systems that team members can access anywhere and at any time at their core.
The question for firms and their technology partners isn’t going to be ‘Should I do this?’ but rather ‘When should I do this?’. Getting the answer to that question right will be key to using these behavioural shifts to create a competitive advantage.
Guest blog by Rebecca Ellis, UK&I Channel Marketing Manager, Unify
