Empowering employees during the “everywhere enterprise” shift

Empowering employees during the “everywhere enterprise” shift

Over the past decade there has been a steady shift of what constitutes value in a company. In previous generations, physical assets such as real estate, plants, machinery and buildings comprised the bulk of valuation. As digital processes have offloaded many of these legacy value centers, more emphasis than ever has been placed on talent. Today, according to Accenture, 85% of market value is driven by the intangibles people create, often through the technology tools they work with. 

Despite the rise in value allocation given to talent, investment to support them has not kept up with this shift. In fact, only 60% of people feel supported by their employer since the pandemic began. The conditions that have arisen due to distributed offices, digitization of work processes and microservice platforms have created a disconnect in what employers think their employees need and what the employees actually need to feel supported.

So what are the areas of focus that employers need to focus on in order to best support their value creators? Here are four areas where you can best support your team as you transition to an “everywhere enterprise” model:

1. Shift to create digital engagement centers that support your future company

According to a recent McKinsey & Co survey, employees are feeling a lack of support in creating digital environments that support relational coordination. Transactional factors, such as compensation, have become table stakes in keeping employees feeling supported. Employers now have to focus on the deeper employee experience and how their job functions relate to their coworkers around them. Collaboration hubs, such as Oblong Mezzanine, allow employees to clearly translate and iterate the value of their work. By enabling multi-content sharing and interaction, employees are able to see and respond to an immersive digital canvas without it having to be dumbed down to fit within the restrictions of conventional collaboration tools that are limited by linear content sharing. 

2. Empower employees across the continuum of workspaces

According to a Zapier survey, 76% of employees of medium-sized businesses said that they spend 1-3 hours a day just moving data from one place to another in order for their teams to coordinate with each other. An additional 1-3 hours a day is spent just trying to find information or a particular document. This leads to 38% of workers replying that burnout is the biggest barrier for them to be productive. This is a symptom of not empowering employees with the modern tools to coordinate cross-functionally. Interestingly, collaborative meetings, often thought to be the biggest time trap, were actually credited as being one of the more productive tools employees deployed. Employees want to work together and, by empowering them with tools like Mezzanine where they can share and interact with multiple streams of content, there is potential to unlock large amounts of time and productivity across multiple workspaces.

3. Engage with customers using multi-content and immersive experiences

To be most efficient, any investment your employees make into the product needs to be seamlessly conveyed to the end customer. Immersive experiences are one of the best ways to shorten buying cycles as well as promote customer loyalty. Last year, Salesforce published a study that found 85% of business customers indicated that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. This has only deepened since the pandemic. Being able to provide an immersive experience where the talent and strengths of the team are on full display not only makes the sale, but it also improves morale and connection with your employees to their careers. In that same study, fifty-three percent of business customers said they feel an emotional connection to the vendors and brands they buy from. Investments into the technology that presents that experience is a proven connection to a return on investment.

4. Providing a multi-content and interactive digital canvas for the hybrid meeting room

In the past five years, the number of SaaS platforms used by organizations worldwide has expanded by over 1,375%. This has dramatically changed the nature of work and the kind of data and applications that are used on a daily basis in not only cross-functional environments, but also individual teams. The amount of work that it takes for teams to not only create content in their individual applications, but then share that information during collaborative meetings or customer presentations in a way that can be easily interpreted and understood has put strain on employees and their productivity. Leading businesses are investing in meeting room technology that allows for simultaneous sharing and interaction of multiple content streams across multiple locations. In bypassing the traditional linear screen sharing process, not only is time saved but decision making is optimized—a win-win for both employers and employees. 

This is a unique time period where action is needed to help employees feel supported and engaged in the hybrid workplace. Investmenting into collaborative and immersive technologies is one of the first steps towards not only supporting employees during the “everywhere enterprise” shift, but also providing a unique experience for your customers that differentiates you from competition.

For more information on how to embrace this shift, visit www.oblong.com.