Are you ready for the future of digital work?
This report from Switchboard is an insightful look into where the digital workplace landscape is heading. Of these 8 trends the one’s I’m paying particular attention to are:
→ Leaders will need to focus on people and wellbeing
→ We’ll have fewer, but more meaningful meetings
→ Automation will free up workers time
→ Workflows work faaaar better when you work in context
(sure, sure, AI is very trendy and is helping me regularly but it’s still got some way to go to be less gimmicky and more impactful)
Leaders will need to focus even more on people and wellbeing
Gen Y and Z care a whole lot more about why we’re doing what we’re doing. If all I cared about was money/career/stability, I would’ve stayed in corporate all those years ago. Now I’m caring a lot more about the why and the who.
Questions I’m often asking myself:
How can we be more empowering with our culture, systems and processes?
How can we add more value to each other despite our distance (7 people, 4 continents)
2. We’ll have fewer meetings
It’s easier to stay focussed.
We only meet fortnightly.
We spend less time organising ourselves as we’re using tools much more effectively
We focus on people centred check ins at the start of meetings rather than jumping straight in
We try to keep agenda items fairly tight so we’re not wandering in the meeting wilderness
We enjoy each others company! Working remote doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. eg. RPS (Rock, paper scissors) and Plink. Try some fun for the first 2 mins of your meeting. If a person turns up late, they miss out!
3. Automation will free up workers time
Some of the automation we use is complex but seriously, there are a lot of ways you can automate without having to use automation software. I’m spending far less time each week doing painful manual admin than I was 5 years ago.
Zapier and Make are also growing their capability to connect to a wide set of digital tools. If the tool you’re using isn’t on their list, you probably shouldn’t be using it.
Some of the ways I save time:
Fathom meeting notes and summaries
Notion Chrome extension to capture things to read later
Calendly meeting bookings plugged in to Zapier and on to Slack, Pipedrive, email etc
Surfe syncs LinkedIn contacts with Pipedrive
Our custom built tool on Knack helps us manage our project budgets far more effectively than Toggl (or any time tracker allows, without spending a lot of money).
4. Workflows work better when you work in context
This is a game changer for us.
Instead of spending a lot of time searching through Google Drive and various other tools, we know we can find most things we need in Notion.
This empowers our team to get things done far more effectively.
Less searching.
Less messaging. (Ok, I like messaging chatter for the team enjoyment factor but not for trying to find that same thing again…!)
One of the reasons we’re wondering whether we still need Asana is that our projects and tasks live on an isolated island, totally disconnected from all the valuable contextual knowledge that is stored elsewhere (proposals, meeting notes, spreadsheet calcs, contact info etc)
There is plenty going on in the digital workplace. Are you on top of it all? If not, get in touch for a free assessment.