Only using this term — digital transformation — in this day and age, gives me shivers. By now, most businesses around the world should have already gone digital. But you know what they say, what you fear most usually happens. And this is how a pandemic has succeeded to change the unchanged.
In this landscape of social distancing and remote working, staying in touch with coworkers and clients is more important than ever before. Real-time communications platforms have cemented the importance of virtual technology across most industries and workspaces. And under this new normal, voice communication has surged back after years on the decline.
Flexible work is no longer just a trend. And remote working — mostly from home during this pandemic — comes with a unique set of challenges. While none outweigh the overall benefits of distributed teams, leaders do need to shift their management and processes to get the best results from a remote workforce.
Remote work delivered by a virtual team has been an increasingly popular workplace trend over the past decade. However, given the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire global workforce is participating in a mass work from home experiment. A recent MIT survey found that more than 34 percent of workers switched to telecommuting in April due to stay-at-home orders.
In 2019, remote employment secured its position as more than just a trend but as a mainstay in American business. With 62 percent professionals working on a remote basis either full-time or at some frequency, according to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work Survey, remote work was quickly becoming the norm.
In 2020, this flexible option has abruptly become mandatory. In the economics of the Coronavirus pandemic, organizations were forced to switch in order to survive. And for this purpose, they need to keep their remote teams virtually connected, no matter how spread out they are. Not only to drive connection between employees, but also to ensure productivity.
Gone are the days when companies had everybody working physically side-by-side and remote teams were scarce. The future of work is upon us, by choice or by context. And now more than ever, it has become vital for any business to streamline its communication flow and enable access to the company’s life to all their employees, regardless of where these are located.
The digital workplace is rapidly evolving. With new tools, greater demand from users, and a focus on productivity and efficiency, technology is changing the way we work for the better. As we look ahead to the trends that are shaping the modern workplace, we notice that flexible work and the availability of the right digital tools will continue to become more and more important.
Cloud-based Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) platforms have become increasingly more popular for businesses of all sizes. Enterprise spending on UCC tools grew to a $45 billion industry this past year, according to Synergy Research Group, with an average annual growth of 16 percent year-over-year.
The remote workforce has gone global. Seventy percent of workers telecommute at least once per week, while 53 percent of employees work in the office at most half the week, according to a recent study from IWG. Even more fascinating, a Citrix study estimates that 50 percent of the workforce will be completely remote by the end of 2020. Such numbers shape the remote work trends for the next period.
Every year on the 8th of March we celebrate the women in our lives. We honor both their accomplishments and the struggles to achieve equality. In this article we will focus on women in tech and learn how the technology industry has come a long way in the past years.
