Evolution of the workplace: from desk to digital
Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog
In today’s world, digitally savvy millennials comprise a big part of our workforce. Also known as digital natives, they provide great value to an organization. This generation is bringing a new wave of innovation to the workplace and there is no doubt that in a few years, a significant of your workforce will consist of individuals who thrive on a digitally-stimulated experience.
To cater to these evolving times, we must take the best of what we have from our existing physical set up and adapt it to a futuristic, open-space environment that is a win for all – IT, business, and employees. The workplace of the future is a digital ecosystem that seamlessly integrates the current organization and encompasses the technological demands that exist outside of it.
Let’s do a quick throwback to the traditional office days – those good old roster-filling days! There were tables piled high with heaps of files. The pen and notepad were our daily reckoners. The ability to use a computer was considered a skill. There was no on-site IT support team. These days are so reminiscent of the tring-tring of the dial-up connection. This sound heralded the dawn of the internet era. However, times have changed since then. It is so hard for the millennials to imagine this setup, which was, in fact, a reality, a few years back.
In the recent years, along with the boom of the IT industry, several other small- to medium-scale industries have flourished, helping to usher in the era of the open-space environment. From comfortable chairs to designated workstations, even to onsite data centers – our offices have become more about experience and inclusion. Even as I speak about the onsite data centers, trends are already moving toward the cloud, and from cloud computing, to edge computing, to IoT. Such are trends, like I say, fast and furious. So what direction is your current workspace moving in?
The office of the future is not about a generation of employees influencing their workplace with their habits. It is about a generation of workplaces that host our employees. Today’s workplace must support businesses and also provide a seamless experience for its employees. An outstanding employee experience isn’t defined by a single attribute. It is no longer determined merely by salary or the company’s reputation. Rather, it is a blend of highly interconnected capabilities – Connected Workspace, Connected Office, and Connected Employees. It is about how you make your employees feel at their jobs.
Millennials today want freedom, but they are also aware of their responsibilities. For example, they want to travel the world, but they also have aspirations and goals. They want a job that doesn’t feel like a job. They want the freedom to work from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.
There are four main reasons for this – digital transformation, mobility, consumerization, and rising workforce decentralization. These have dramatically altered your end-user market’s landscape. The challenge remains to seamlessly connect the three pillars of your organization that currently exist in silos – the workspace, the office, and the employees. These form the individual units that make the bigger picture – the honeycomb: an interconnected, complex structure much like our Connected Employee Experience. Because, bees that work together, make honey together – the sweet nectar that every millennial today is looking for!
Here’s my answer to what millennials want:
- Workplace as a personalized application suite
- Mobile device applications for seamless communication within the organization and with our customers (anytime, anywhere)
- Meetings with leadership teams, global leaders, and industry professionals on a regular basis via interactive webcasts, video conferences, and live chats
- Global community engagement into crowdsourcing of ideas for improvements and top-value projects
- Communication via chatbots (the social-first approach) and use of gamification technologies to tackle challenging scenarios.
- Don’t we all love shopping online? We choose the item, check details, place the order and track it online. How simple would it be if our IT queries were solved in a similar fashion? And with the MyIT portal, you can exactly do that. It’s a self-service portal that addresses your queries in a similar way. All you need to do is input your query, select an appropriate service, and raise a ticket. The tracking can be done through the web or app.
At Capgemini, we experience cultural transformation along with digitalization. We’ve become performance-centric and digitally efficient masters, who’ve crossed the “point of no return” with digital adoption. Of course, it is challenging to adapt to the new ways we perform, operate, and collaborate across 200k people but we are working on a smooth and automated organizational structure. And that’s how we shall ferry our global employees and clients towards a boundary-less connected space. Find out more about this offering here.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
