Technology or Strategy: How Is the Workplace Being Reimagined?

Preamble

One of the biggest arguments surrounding the modern workplace today is the question of what drives the transformation of the remote working environment: technology or strategy?

But let's take a little detour and see how we got here.

The workplace is no longer a place where people ‘go to' but rather a thing people are involved with. This is stretching to become a thing people can do anywhere, anytime. Employers and businesses are leaning in to listen and adhere to the growing workspace demands of employees in a bid to retain the top talents. Factually, there is a global trend in which a large number of employees are resigning from their traditional workplaces to find modern workspaces that give them the right work-life balance and correspond to their working styles.

With businesses standing to gain so much from the transformation to a modern workspace, there are questions surrounding what a modern workplace should consist of:

What technology should be used? What culture should be adopted? How should it be managed? Who to employ?

Notwithstanding, businesses have been making provisional decisions on adopting a modern workplace. Some are going fully remote, some are holding on to the physical workspace, while others are adopting a hybrid system. Nevertheless, every workplace needs to adopt a system that sees employees come in every day with a purpose rather than a routine. This will create a natural idea-generation workplace indispensable for the organic growth of companies in the modern world.

The Perfect Workspace

The perfect workspace throws the limelight on people, not things. In a modern world, the best workspace should be a remote workspace because it offers better work-life balance to employees and allows them to work from comfortable third spaces. A study from Forbes showed that remote workers are more effective than in-office or hybrid workers.

Turing’s CEO, Jonathan Siddharth remarked, ‘....remote work is not just a post-pandemic trend but a new era, where remote-first companies have an unparalleled advantage over their competitors when it comes to hiring and retaining top talents.'

However, despite its glamor and advantages, some industries are not prepared for it. Some companies, especially startups cannot afford to take these tentative steps in the form of risks.

Therefore they are asking pertinent remote work questions like:

‘What technology to adopt?’:

In a remote workforce, constant communication and collaboration are essential. These channels are technologically enabled to provide almost 24/7 open channels between workers. Some of the best technological tools for remote work include:

• Administrative automation: There is an unprecedented amount of flexibility introduced by remote work for remote companies. However, this flexibility exposes a new unwanted complex structure for administrative duties. To ensure that performance management and collaboration always stay fluid, activities, work progress, and schedules should be transparent and monitored. Administrative automation technologies like Timely, Dewo, and Expensify provide solutions for digital coordination without taking away the efficiency of remote work.

• Virtual reality communication: There are awesome remote communication tools for remote teams, such as Trello, Slack, Microsoft teams, and Zoom. But for remote companies that want a replication of a real-life meeting, virtual reality conferences are on the way. Virtual reality, aided by AI, provides a simulated meeting environment for remote teams looking for a more personal and authentic experience.

• 5G: A fast and steady network connection is an indispensable asset for remote teams, and that is what 5G offers. The 5G network is 100 times faster than 4G and will create a more seamless connection for remote teams, especially for global teams with workers in areas with limited connection to WiFi or Ethernet.

• Cloud-based storage: Cloud computing and storage are must-haves for remote teams because cloud storage provides storage space and access to storage spaces from anywhere in the world. This proves useful for distributed teams that are using a lot of virtual tools already.

‘What culture should I adopt?’:

The most successful businesses are the ones with the best workplace culture. The best workplace culture should be one that promotes the well-being of the employees. In simple terms, good workplace culture is ‘one that prioritizes the well-being of employees, offers support at all levels within the organization, and has policies in place that encourage respect, trust, empathy, and support.'

For remote teams, a workplace culture might seem to be far-reaching but it is not. A blog on Turing, a remote tech company that uses an Intelligent Talent Cloud to connect the world’s best software developers to high-quality U.S. jobs, describes a healthy remote work culture as one that has ‘...Clear performance goals, constructive feedback, and employee recognition culture.’

‘How should it be managed?’: Managing a remote team can seem challenging due to several reasons that may include transitioning challenges, time-zone challenges, international payment structures, compliances, etc. Jonathan Siddharth rightly puts it when he said

“The nuts and bolts of running a globally distributed team are not easy. It’s painful to manage international payments. It’s complex to handle Global HR correctly from a compliance and worker classification perspective, and staying fully compliant with international labor laws is pretty challenging. For these reasons, we see the birth of the Turing Deep Talent Cloud,”

Therefore, remote companies and team managers require more prudence and effort. Below are some tips that can help manage remote teams effectively:

• Make use of a Deep Talent Cloud
• Prioritize empathy and connection among coworkers
• Promote asynchronous communication
• Set up communication norms from the onset
• Make use of the right tools
• Encourage 1-on-1 meetings
• Always ask for feedback from team members

‘Who to employ?’:

The question of who to employ stems from the competitive nature of global teams for top talents. Startups are more likely to struggle with hiring top talent when competing with top companies. Startups can get pre-vetted and global talents from platforms like Turing or a freelancing site to ease the hiring processes and access a global talent pool.

So, Is It Technology or Strategy That Makes the Difference?

After establishing that the perfect modern workplace should be remote and remote work questions have been answered, the pertinent question for reshaping the modern workspace still lingers… is it technology or strategy that makes the difference?

According to an MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte digital business study, strategy, not technologies, drive digital transformation. All digital technologies such as mobile tech, analytics, social, and cloud are relevant technologies, but they do not drive the digital transformation that reshapes modern workplaces. Digital transformation of workspaces depends on the style and processes of the integration of these technologies and how they are used.

Companies with a clear digital strategy combined with the right culture and leadership are best suited to drive digital transformation in workplaces. A huge investment in technologies without a corresponding investment into the organizational capabilities will lead to failed implementations and loss of capital. More than these, it will inhibit the technologies from reaching their full potential.

Strategies That Drive the Transformation of Remote Working Environments

Several businesses employ different strategies in adopting technologies and driving digital transformation depending on the particulars of their businesses. However, for remote work, the strategies are similar. There are four main baskets of remote business transformation strategies: Process and operations, product and service, customers, and employees.

• Process and operations -Migrating fundamental business processes to the cloud: One of the first steps in transforming business processes to remote work and in remote work is converting all important business processes into streamlined workflows and uploading them to the cloud. This digitization, streamlining, and restructuring of processes improve overall efficiency and productivity and helps to track signs of progress within teams.

• Employees -Improving employee engagement: Technologies cannot replace employees. A business can have the best technological tools for remote work, but when employees are not happy or engaged, results will always be poor. Employees should always be connected to the company’s culture. Their challenges about remote work should be listened to, their ideas welcomed, and solutions proffered.

• Customers -Enhancing remote customer engagement: Digital transformations should be an improvement to traditional customer service and engagement channels. Digital transformations can come in the form of interactive self-service channels and AI chatbots that can help boost customer retention and improve engagements.

• Product and services -Building better products and product delivery channels: Products are the final judges of a business' product value proposition. Businesses should build products that can scale or adapt to changing remote needs of the market, and this also includes the processes through which these products are delivered to customers.

Synopsis

Although the importance of advanced technology cannot be overstated for remote work, any business without a proven strategy will always fail or, at least, perform below standard. However, it is pertinent to note that these strategies, no matter what they may be, must support both the business and employees’ interests, to sustain the company in the long run.