Business trends 2022: The new modern workplace

Creating a great place to work with technology

‘The Great Resignation’ or ‘The War on Tech Talent’ are headlines we’ve all seen over the past six months.

The retention of talent has never been more critical to a business and a key factor in doing that is providing a great workplace for your people. Technology plays a huge part in that experience and that’s why modern workplace is one of our Tech Trend 2022 topics.

We spoke to Richard Chesterman, General Manager of Technology at Interactive and Lizzy Jones, Head of Delivery and User Experience at Interactive about modern workplace.

Expert insights:

Richard Chesterman
General Manager of Technology at Interactive

I think modern workplaces means a reflection on the ways that the hybrid workplace has evolved in the last couple of years because of accelerators like COVID.

Obviously working from home has become part of everyone’s daily lives now and it’s less of a new thing and more of an expected way of working.

What’s interesting is how several of the big players have responded to that. You would have seen Microsoft’s new ideas at the recent Ignite event. The technology they are rolling out to help improve collaboration tools is exciting. The idea of there being much more creative ways of working online such as virtualised rooms where you pop on a VR headset, get in a room with colleagues, use post-it notes and different tools to brainstorm.

Another big takeaway from Ignite was helping people find things more easily across multiple platforms. There’s lots more artificial intelligence (A.I.) going on in the background to solve this problem. It’s now more of an intuitive way of finding information for you. For example, if you’re in a Teams meeting and you’re talking about a document that you’re working on, a little message will pop up and ask, ‘Hey, are you referring to this document?’ and you’ll be able to access it immediately if you need to. I see more of that sort of innovation which will help employees have a better experience.

A lot of people would also have seen Facebook rebrand to Meta a few months ago and Mark Zuckerberg talk about metaverses. I think the drivers around some of this technology is again about solving the problems that are happening at the moment. If you think about the big shift into the home environment over the last 18 months, a big challenge has been around connection. So, feeling part of the team, building relationships with new team members, collaborating well, etc.

I think those sorts of things will really start to ramp up in 2022 because finding more engaging and efficient ways for your employees to work together virtually will be a big part of this modern workplace.

Expert insights:

Lizzy Jones
Head of Delivery and User Experience at Interactive

For me, a modern workplace means a few different things. It’s understanding what our workforce wants and how they want to work. The feedback that we’ve been given is that people want the flexibility to choose whether they’re in the office or at home or a combination of that.

You must look at technology and see how it can support that by making sure that things are secure, accessible, and quick. In terms of how a company can do it, you should always have human centred design at the forefront of your mind.

We take a human centred design approach to every new technology product we work on at Interactive.

Our belief is If an employee’s experience is a great one, then the customer’s experience should also be great. The employee’s influence on technology roadmaps is only increasing and companies need to strive to ensure their people have the best experience at work. Every company wants to be the best place to work and to be a place of work where your opinion and experience are valued, and the people and the humans come first.