This is a guest blog post by Ronald van Loon, Principal Analyst, CEO of the Intelligent World.

Technology is a double-edged sword for today’s employees. On the one hand it gives them more control over where, when, and how they work; on the other, if technology is confusing, disparate, or inaccessible, it can impede work progress, productivity, and continuity.

Also, employee expectations are changing. Prior to the global pandemic, employees wanted more control over their entire work process and perceive digital technology, along with a flexible work arrangement, as a means to that end. In fact, over 75 percent of surveyed employees said that a more flexible work schedule would boost their ability to innovate and be creative.

How have these expectations expanded or changed over recent months? Consider some of these points from recent surveys:

At the same time, businesses need to be prepared for disruption and unexpected circumstances, ensuring employees have the freedom and flexibility to safely and effectively work during emergency situations. By providing people with resources and application access, they can be agile and prepared regardless of the situation.

For example, remote work solutions help ensure safe and secure access to business applications and critical information when people are working from home due to safety initiatives enacted by companies in response to COVID-19.

Agile workspaces are also helpful in instances of natural disasters. The city of Corona in California, in response to the frequent threat of wildfires, has implemented workspace technology that promotes a data and cloud-based strategy so that employees can successfully work remotely. The city of Corona and the University of Sydney are two examples illustrating how business continuity and remote work capabilities allowed many to address the incredible challenges posed by the global pandemic, while establishing a foundation to explore opportunities in the future.

Many modern workspaces adopt digital technologies to improve work environments with more intelligence, agility, and automation in the hopes of empowering employees, but it can also result in surmounting distractions, productivity impediments, and static work environments.

Ronald van Loon is a Citrix partner, and as a regular fixture within the industry, and has a well-developed perspective of the evolving challenges facing today’s workforce.

In the quest to create an employee-centric experience, organizations are increasingly looking to AI and automation to bring more efficiency, harmony and agility into workspaces and propel better business results.

It’s up to business leaders to take hold of the reins and drive these transformation initiatives forward by preparing employees for a future that will be increasingly defined by AI enabled human-technology work relationships. It’s crucial that organizational leadership lay the right building blocks for the future of work in any eventuality.

Now is the time for embracing AI-human collaboration for the betterment of the employee experience.

Obstacles in the Path Toward Workplace Continuity

No matter the obstacle, situation, or location, work needs to continue to function under all conditions. By leveraging technology as a means to promote flexible work models, organizations can empower their workforce with tools and capabilities that promote information access and collaboration while ensuring that the business functions successfully at all times — regardless of challenges.

Severed Ties Between HR and IT

Traditionally, HR and IT have suffered from a siloed relationship that has caused natural obstacles to arise between the two departments, instead of presenting a united front. However, as organizations struggle with the challenges of creating a more efficient workspace and positive employee experience, the barrier between HR and IT must give way.

HR represents the employee experience, while IT characterizes digital transformation. When these two business lines join forces, the results can be a collaborative connection that can help reshape the employee and workspace experience across the entire organization.

Distractions

Employees use dozens of apps just to accomplish a single business process. This can affect productivity if employees are devoting valuable time cycling between apps to complete work objectives.

Disorganized and inaccessible information also causes employees to spend more than 20 percent of their time searching for the right information to perform their specific tasks well. This creates distractions and downtime during work projects.

With texts, alerts and chat messages abounding, employees are being interrupted approximately every two minutes, or 1,110 times per day. 

Frustrations

Employees can easily become frustrated by these workplace distractions and are prevented from optimizing their work performance when they rely on proprietary company technology that is:

  • Unintuitive
  • Inaccessible
  • Disruptive
  • Cumbersome

Building Blocks of Business Readiness

Smart digital workspaces are one of the building blocks of the employee experience, and the employee experience is one of the building blocks for the future of work.

Implementing a more intuitive way to work via intelligent workplace technologies, embracing distributed work models, and empowering employees to perform their jobs well with the right tools, wherever they’re located, helps organizations ready themselves for any disruption.

As business leaders lay the AI and automation bricks for their digital house, they need to ensure their building blocks are coexisting and working together to strengthen workflow capabilities and provide a foundation for employee success.

After all, people are a company’s most valuable asset.

AI and Automation Help Organizations Thrive in Any Circumstances

The true value of technology isn’t in the results it can produce, but in the value it provides for employees. Organizations that embrace this mindset and use technology to generate more employee-centric experiences and prepare their workplace for business continuity in any scenario, both good and challenging, are going to realize the most transformative benefits and innovation.

Workplace Agility

At the apex of workplace agility and continuity is AI, the foundation of intelligent digital workspaces:

  • Empowers employees with the capabilities and tools they need to do their jobs well in any circumstance or location.
  • Data and analytics drive more diversity and equality, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or location.
  • Introduces more intelligence in IT systems to create more visibility, simplicity and security.
  • Creates more employee personalization to help them do better work and produce better outcomes.
  • Enables companies to provide opt-in and opt-out for employees so they can achieve a more balanced work and personal life.
  • Infuses more flexibility and inclusivity in work models so organizations can utilize a wider talent pool.
  • Provides employees with the insights they need, in real time, on any preferred device.
  • Automatically performs mundane, repetitive, and low-value tasks to free employees to do more complex, meaningful, and satisfying work.

Secure, Remote Work Scenarios

Employees need to be able to do their work in either good or challenging circumstances. Intelligent workspace technology provides a secure, safe, and uninterrupted solution for continuous work operations.

Remote work solutions help organizations continue to evolve and maintain best practices in instances of either stability and unpredictability. It enables employees to access work resources, apps, systems, and data in any circumstance while promoting productivity.

It also allows companies to mobilize their capabilities and workforce and ensure their employees remain connected by leveraging information and technology wherever employees are located. This also requires secure remote access. Using a zero trust approach (instead of VPNs) to deploy a secure digital workspace mitigates risk, providing access policies for the time of authentication and continuing protection while the user is working. Security remains in place across all types of applications — whether in the cloud, on premises, or delivered through SaaS.

As a dynamic workplace solution, intelligent workspace technology supports the distributed work models being increasingly adopted by businesses to keep the ball of business innovation rolling.

Distributed Workforces Present New Opportunities

As remote working surges, corresponding distributed workforces offer the ability for individuals to start expanding their career outlook throughout more global opportunities without the need for relocation. It also enables organizations to broaden recruitment efforts beyond the scope of a traditional office location.

This new workforce model can greatly impact sustainability initiatives as well. The main contributors to global GHG emissions are heat production, electricity and other types of energy (35 percent). The electricity consumption from IT comprises 10 percent of an organization’s electricity, and sustainable IT practices that drive more environmentally conscious remote work environments could radically lower carbon emissions.

IT has the potential to reduce an organization’s carbon footprint surrounding remote work by providing a secure, agile infrastructure for remote workers, using 100 percent renewable cloud-based technologies, and equipping employees with energy-efficient devices that enable them to work on their terms and increase the lifespan of devices.

Intuitive Technology Fuels Organizational Readiness

With all of the new performance pressures and unpredictable global conditions facing today’s employees, technology needs to be an intuitive solution that helps employees do meaningful work — anytime and anywhere, instead of creating barriers to productivity and innovation.

Organizations must enable the future workspace today — agile, collaborative environments with a balance of digital and physical to light the charge for productivity, regardless of disruption.

Citrix is at the forefront of workspace transformation, helping to intelligently optimize the experience for employees so they can continue to master their craft and focus on what they do best in any circumstance.