We are barraged by a continual stream of distractions including advertisements and media, video calls from colleagues, family members working just down the hall or across the table, and increasing pressure to make do with less as we deal with product shortages and the highest inflation levels in 40 years.
Our frantic pace comes with a cost: diminished work performance and poor quality decisions. Too much information interferes with our ability to sort to the most relevant and too many decisions to make overwhelm and fatigue our brains. In addition, living in a state of continuous partial attention diminishes our performance across the board. Forty-eight states have banned texting while driving, because doing both at the same time results in more accidents. We can expect similar diminished performance on work tasks.
As we move into 2022 with the hope of an end to the pandemic, businesses must focus technology purchasing on maximizing user experience to cut through the clutter and keep us focused on critical job tasks. Look for these four trends to be important.
- #WFH: Work from home and hybrid work require seamless work from anywhere (WFX) technologies.
- Automation: Increasing automation drives us toward human-centric job design.
- Focused Work: Focused work environments engage employees and maximize productivity.
- User-Centered Features: Market leaders are signaling another major shift in the ways we buy technology that puts the focus on value for both the manufacturer and the buyer.
A Mobile Workforce Demands Seamless Work from Anywhere.
Quite simply, we like to work-from-home—or at least to have the option to do so. Widespread work from home during the pandemic opened our eyes to a few things. Family relationships can be improved as we spend more time together. Our side hustles may just be a hassle. Time lost to commuting is just that…lost, and we’re not willing to put up with it anymore.
This preference, however, complicates our demands on the technologies we use to work. Now, in addition to working securely and effectively in a controlled corporate network environment, our computers and systems need to work just as securely and effectively when we’re at home, on the road, or working from the neighborhood library or coffee shop.
Though only 10% of companies are likely to commit to a fully remote work future, Forrester estimates 60% of US businesses will attempt a hybrid work model. The key is choosing software and services that seamlessly move with us from one place to another. This seamless work from anywhere is founded on cloud services that naturally lend themselves to multiple access locations while maintaining critical security protocols and preventing duplicated effort.
The key for C-suite leaders: Expand and deepen investments in cloud to unite systems and provide support for a seamless WFX experience.
Meaningful Work Increases Thanks to Automation
Automation is at the forefront of technology implementations because of the squeeze occurring between rising costs of business and increasing customer demands. Further, automation can significantly assist efforts to create a seamless WFX experience. With automation, the information we need to perform a work task accompanies the task itself, reducing the noise we’re exposed to as well as the number of decisions we need to make about the quality of information, resulting in better decision-making.
However, automation is also increasing worker anxiety. In fact, alarms abound about the potential impact automation will have on the number of available jobs. The reality is that automation affects work tasks much more than jobs as a whole, giving organizations an opportunity to redesign jobs in a way that offers workers peace of mind. It’s not hard. Simply remove mundane tasks that have been automated and build job descriptions around newer more cognitively-loaded tasks that are ultimately rated as more rewarding and engaging by workers.
The key for mid-level managers: Automate everything you can, but partner with HR to redesign jobs with displaced tasks to include more meaningful job requirements.
Employee Experience Improves in a Focused Environment
We’ve all been there. Our day starts off as usual, and we expect to only make a small dent in our pile of responsibilities by the end of our shift. But when we look up hours later, we see that our stack is almost gone and realize we were able to tune out the noise and achieve extraordinary productivity. What happened? Maybe we accidentally closed our email inbox, or our colleagues were too busy with their own tasks to spend time Slacking us, or notifications were off on our phone. Somehow, we entered a quiet zone of zero distractions. Sounds too good to be true, but it’s not entirely unusual to have occasional days that are hyper-focused, and technology is stepping up to help us create more time in this zone. Let’s take a look at just a few of these productivity tools:
- Omm Writer: Got something to write? Omm Writer simplifies your workspace to boost productivity through features like full-screen mode and white noise audio.
- Centered: Task-switching killing your productivity? Centered helps manage your task list and integrates into your calendar as well as providing meditation and music to assist with focus.
- Momentum Chrome Extension: Need a visual to recharge your energy? Momentum replaces your default homepage with a beautiful photo and optional components including a personalized greeting, weather widget, focus task reminder, inspirational quote, and more.
- Grammarly: Need an editor? The Grammarly plug-in enhances writing experiences by evaluating word choice and phrasing, correcting grammatical errors, and measuring whether your reading level and tone match your intended audience.
The key for IT technology reviewers: investigate and implement more technologies that support a quiet, focused work experience—especially for workers whose tasks carry a heavy cognitive load that requires focus.
User-Centered Features Change How We Buy Technology
Despite forerunners like our own ImageSilo, which was launched in 1999, cloud technologies didn’t come to mainstream awareness until a little over a decade ago. Why is cloud the most popular form of application delivery today? Cloud changed the economics of technology purchasing, moving us from a large up-front payment to smaller, incremental monthly payments. We’re heading toward another major shift in the way we buy technologies and preparing now will make the transition easier.
Deloitte calls it “flexible consumption.” Gartner uses “composable” to describe it. Regardless of the term we ultimately settle on, it’s a move toward user-defined abilities and pricing. We’re moving away from buying licenses for products and toward paying for only the components or services that we actually use (estimated to be less than 20% of available features).1 It’s a trend that simplifies our lives because we can “custom build” technology solutions that exactly fit our needs and decrease money spent on little-used features.
The key for C-suite leaders: Keep your eye on this emerging trend and start evaluating which capabilities in your existing technologies are essential versus those that are rarely used.
Placing these four technology trends at the forefront of business strategy and IT priorities now positions businesses well for a post-pandemic workplace and economy.
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