While companies are all unique and have their own identities, we see common trends affecting the culture of work and employees’ expectations on what a modern work environment provides.
More collaboration. There is a movement toward transparency and inclusivity in how decisions are made. Organization structures are becoming more flat. And those teams are dynamic. It’s rare that people don’t change on a multi-month project, which means there is a greater need for communication and collaboration to sustain performance and drive results.
Increased productivity. When someone new joins a team, the first step is usually for all team members to go through their email and find the information needed to get the new person up to speed. It doesn’t help when information and project files are scattered throughout their inboxes. In order to avoid falling behind on deadlines, it’s essential that all documents and files are consolidated in a single, shared place for easy viewing and modification. This calls for increased productivity.
Greater mobility. In addition to an increase in the amount of collaboration and productivity, there are other characteristics that are different about how we’re working together today. There’s a greater need to enable communication and productivity regardless of where team members are located.
Are you prepared?
Based on the trends we’ve seen, we can confidently say that teamwork looks different today. And it can be difficult to stay productive when there are ongoing technical and cultural changes happening all around you.
SMBs now face new challenges that come with trying to accommodate the rise of mobile workforces and dynamic team structures. It’s difficult to collaborate effectively when you cannot reach someone because they’re out of the office. And you may face productivity challenges when communication between team members dissolves into long email threads with various attachments and different versions of documents. While we won’t focus too
much on this today, we do want to note that companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage and secure your business files and applications when employees are accessing data on personal devices. This introduces serious security risks.