Collaboration technologies to be the future technology

The necessary shift to a work from home (WFH) arrangement has halted face to face interactions and changed how people work. Enterprises should try their best to enhance the benefits that WFH has to offer. However, there are still many unknowns about the long-term impact WFH will have on enterprise innovation and collaboration - and it is a scenario all business leaders must consider. With the emergence of newer technology to complement the present gap in the system in terms of adoption of unverified new hardware and software, data becomes vulnerable, which is said to be the new oil in this digital or vulnerable economy. Data is incredibly valuable for modern, digital business. But even the most valuable customer data can lose all of its value - or worse, become a liability - if it is not securely and efficiently prepared for analysis. Businesses have accepted that the workplace will never be the same again.

A survey by McKinsey says, more than 20% of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if they were working from an office. The challenge that industry leaders see is: how can employees collaborate effectively and engage with their employer if they are only spending a proportion of their time in the office environment? When they are at home, how do they collaborate with people in the office or front-line staff? Although video conferencing has taken off since the pandemic began, people felt that live video conferencing was also becoming tedious. There is also strong evidence that people are not fully focused on the discussion when participating in conference calls.

Speaking about their own experiences of remote working, many admit that video conferencing takes its toll on concentration. One of the areas Workplace from Facebook is looking to address is how to reduce video fatigue and enable presence and connection without making people feel it is a drain. It is exploring how to balance asynchronous and synchronous communications and leverage modalities other than the webcam, to avoid people feeling like they are constantly presenting.

We generally use Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, TeamViewer or Go-To-Webinar for the video conferencing and document sharing. Global organisations are not expecting to go back to normal now that the remote working genie has been let out of the bottle. One of the unexpected outcomes to arise from the coronavirus is that it has led to a dramatic shift in expectations. What will post-pandemic work patterns look like? A survey reveals, more employers are seeing somewhat better productivity from their remote workers.

Now that people have experienced almost a year of flexible working, if they are indeed more productive, then remote working should not be seen merely as a stopgap until offices reopen. It offers businesses the potential to do things that were far more difficult to achieve before the pandemic. “Globally, remote working has interesting dimensions as it enables businesses to bring in experts from different parts of the world very quickly. With this the business into the cloud managed and professional services market is going to surpass 200 billion dollars by 2024.