Top consultancy firms are conducting research, producing white papers and providing lots of consulting (go figure) around work force transformation.
What’s all the clamor about?
Well, there’s no denying it. The percentage of millennial-generation workers in the work force is only getting larger. The tipping point came in 2016, when, according to Pew Research, 56 million millennials were working or looking for work. That compared to 53 million Generation Xers and 41 million baby boomers.
Brookings projects that members of the millennial generation (22 to 37 years of age in 2018) will make up 75 percent of the work force by 2025.
The outcomes from all this research confirms what you already know: Millennials tend to view their work and workplace differently from those who came before.
A study by Dell and Intel drew the following conclusion: “They (millennials) are less personally invested in their jobs, but place greater value on workplace technology. They acknowledge that traditional face-to-face communication still dominates. They also acknowledge how communications technologies are changing the future workspace itself, but see how communications technologies are transforming relationships with colleagues. And they are willing to embrace and even drive the transformation.”
Which is to say, work force transformation inevitably leads to workplace transformation. We can see this as progressive companies leverage technology to help transform their physical offices/cubicles to a more flexible anywhere, anytime work environment. For example, workplaces should consider implementing a software solution like FilecenterDMS to convert paper documents into PDFs so that the filing system can be updated, backed up and streamlined digitally.
Audiovisual technologies play a significant role in this work place transformation:
Giving employees the freedom to work from anywhere
Encouraging collaboration with peers via meeting rooms and tools, and
Providing collaboration tools which let people work together on projects or have face-to-face meetings regardless of their location.
But, in order to make audiovisual technologies truly useful in creating collaborative work environments, we believe there is yet another transformation that needs to take place. And that’s the manner in which such technology is selected and sourced.
Today, when organizations want to implement a technology for a particular task, often there isn’t a lot of thought around other tasks and adjacent workflows that could potentially be affected and/or benefitted.
Moreover, decision makers often lack sufficient knowledge of all the available (or soon to be available) technologies that can accomplish the task. That’s not to mention having an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses that distinguish those technologies.
ExhibitOne Design Engineer Jeff Mackey likens it to someone (a decision maker) trying to satisfy another person’s desire for dessert. Everyone agrees ice cream is the solution. And with no further input, the decision maker walks into Baskin-Robbins. Good luck with that selection!
Additionally, unless the technology buys are adhering to an overarching strategy, the result can be a room/building full of technologies that compromise interoperability, performance and future technology implementations.
What to do differently? Partner.
Involve your employees, managers, technology leaders AND your technology provider up front. This integrative model merges technical and business knowledge and applies it directly to the business need. This holistic approach enables fully informed technology design that minimizes unintended consequences, maximizes user acceptance and ensures you have a solution that is designed for the transforming work force of the future…right from the start.
Or…you can pick one scoop of pistachio almond in a sugar cone and hope for the best.
