It’s amazing to think that a decade ago mobiles were bricks, the best game you was going to get was snake and taking pictures was a thing dreams were made of. Now look at us with our sleek phones that break a lot easier, multiple games your friends invite you to through Facebook and we’ve just had the uproar of the selfie stick. Whilst the basics of technology are being thrown at you left, right and center people often forget how important technology could be if used properly.
So here’s five trends that have taken the workplace by storm and will carry on changing it:
Distributed Workforce: With more and more technology available such as tablets, phones, laptops, etc. For collaborating and communication, companies are taking the best person for the job because businesses don’t have to narrow their recruitment hunt by location anymore.
The indirect effect of this trend is less use of a meeting space as you can do it from the comfort of your own home with a brew, your shirt, tie (because you want to look professional on skype) and PJ bottoms. But as traditional meeting/training rooms see a decline, companies will be taking the money they save and use it towards investments on cloud based collaboration tools, we offer this service: https://www.synergytechnology.co.uk/services/hostedplatform/, as businesses are growing at a rapid rate cloud computing is becoming a business necessity.
De-materialization/Mobility: So we’ve watched phones grow in technology but shrink in size. There was a time when we were wondering if technology was going to become invisible as it was shrinking at an extreme rate. Little did we know the size would start to go up again!
De-materialization has started to happen as stationary has become obsolete you don’t need the fancy diaries or business cards anymore, although both these examples are lovely to have, it’s all saved electronically now. With specific software dedicated to businesses and their needs with diaries that everyone can look at, at any time to check availability of people and a place to store all business contacts and even the people who work there such as the software we offer: https://www.synergytechnology.co.uk/products/superofficecrm/,
Consumerisation: For the longest time commercial/pro products drove the development of consumer products. The coolest gadgets were developed for the workplace and then with a bit of tweaking in the looks department to make them ‘fashionable’ they’d power their way through to the consumer market. Over the past several years this trend has been turned upside down. The technology in the work place is now being driven from the consumer back to the workplace. This led to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement.
This created a much needed boost for businesses to embrace the technology that runs on consumer platforms as they weren’t getting the new toys first anymore. Now smart gadgets are the center of the work force eco-system. Why would an employee with a skip in his step and an iPad in his hand want to swap that for a big, clunky laptop and back problems that comes from carrying it around? Sadistic maybe or they generally don’t want to. This was creating mass headaches everywhere until they realised there’s nothing wrong with them using their own iPads as long as it’s kitted out with the relevant software.
Social Media & Social CRM: If there’s still a few people shying away from this then I suggest you put on your big boy pants, get rid of the dummy and realise social media is here to stay and it is growing at an alarmingly fast rate. People and businesses are not just searching the web for insightful information, they’re searching their friends and colleagues recommendations, occasionally you’re going to see a cat playing a piano or get those dreaded Facebook game requests that have put a lot of people off getting into social media in the first place but little do they know they can control their surroundings. If it’s only for business use hide the things you don’t want to see and focus on what the web has to offer you. You can look at what your connections like through a legacy method like search. Google was the first to embrace this, obviously, as it is the most recently used search engine, and coined the phrase ‘google it’. But Bing got one over on Google and entered a partnership with Facebook that will further the process. Businesses added this to their decision process as they will leverage this capability to seek the input of influencers.
To capture, track, store and utilize the raw data, Social CRM will further revolutionise how we interact with the web to better the workplace. It is becoming inherent in the way we work and live, why wouldn’t it be a part of the way we manage relationships for business? So if you’re not social media savvy and your business isn’t on there, it might be time to give that marketing team a new challenge.
Unified Communications (UC): The phrase that everyone says and no one has a clue what it means. UC as a practice was developed to capture the vast silos of communication and bring them to a single platform. This includes messaging, video, voice, email, social media and apps. The solutions for this type of integration are still complex but with the previously mentioned expectations and the fact people can do voice, messaging, video and email from a single platform via google apps, the expectation from the CI’s customers are going to increase very quickly.
The cloud can be used as the solution for how people want to consume UC. This will allow enterprise unified communications to be delivered to smaller organisations with smaller out of pocket investments. The incredible demand for this among the work force will continue to rise. Assuming they can chat, use voice and video, and applications for free with the tools like Facebook and Google.
Whilst some business owners are jumping on the band wagon and improving their business with all the new tech there’s still some business owners that sit back and watch the world change and hope they can wait it out. Well the world isn’t going to change back to what it was before technology hit the business world hard. Fortunately, we can help you get your business up to speed with the software we sell and we have a support team in place for any worries or problems you might have.
Just send us an email.
