Coworker collaboration occurs on a virtual-first basis in today’s workplace.
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So much electronic ink and hot human air was spent heralding the return of knowledgeable workers to their corporate offices. Employees are given unparalleled flexibility in determining their work locations and working hours as offices reopen.
The big paradox of this new world order is that knowledge workers spend most of their day in a digital cocoon where they struggle to do the ‘real work’ while dealing with relentless emails, voicemails, text messages, Jira tickets, ServiceNow requests, application alerts, project status updates, etc. Employees operate in this virtual cocoon by wearing headphones and blanks staring at their computer screens whether they are sitting at home or in an office.
No wonder so many workers are unhappy about returning to the office. The physical location of their digital cocoons is completely immaterial to them. In fact, their primary interest in returning to an office is social in nature and has little to do with their job performance or productivity.
The second big paradox of this new world order is that too many collaboration tools residing in the virtual -first workplace – in many cases – undermine the productivity they originally intended to stimulate. With the outbreak of the crisis at Covid, a series of point solutions for email and text communication, videoconferencing, document sharing and task prioritization were put in place on a wholesale basis to ensure the continuity of business operations. These tools during 2019 were never designed to address the collaboration needs of physically scattered, virtual-first, always-on, asynchronous and increasingly self-managed workplaces in the 2020s.
Knowledgeable workers are falling victim to the open access lottery for their time and attention created by today’s collection of collaboration tools. The burnout phenomenon that has been so widely reported in the popular press stems from the endless transition of context triggered by these tools and the corresponding need to work longer hours to make up for the time lost in the collaborative distractions.
The time is ripe – some will say overdue – for a new generation of collaboration tools that offer the introduction of new capabilities in the following areas.
Communication management
An abstraction service is needed that can pre-process information received by employees through the multiple communication channels mentioned above. This service needs to filter out irrelevant or unnecessary incoming communications; establish a contextual basis for linking and mitigating cross-channel communications; varying communications in terms of their explicit or implied response requirements; and prioritize communications in terms of critical time, business critical, freshness and emotion.
This service must be configured to mirror the needs, interests and preferences of individual employees. It should serve as a customized communication console that changes over time as employee information needs and priorities change. Its utility increases as messaging interactions with co-workers become increasingly asynchronous.
Most of the functions described above are typically performed by human assistants who support C-level executives in Fortune 500 companies. Executive assistants regularly review all incoming communications and, in some cases, even suggest or prepare appropriate responses. They amplify business -critical, time -sensitive communications and put business messages as usual in a discretionary reading file or ignore them entirely. The service envisioned here will give each knowledge worker a dedicated and personalized communication assistant.
Prioritizing and scheduling work
The current generation of job management tools are typically designed to organize team -related work tasks or personal work tasks. No one tool is holistic enough to cover the full spectrum of work -related activities that most workers are expected to perform.
Both types of tools have similar limitations. Tasks are often interpreted in a rough way when in fact they consist of multiple subtasks that must be scheduled semi-independently. Prioritizing work across multiple projects or operational workflows is left to the discretion of individual employees. And both types of tools are typically incapable of estimating the time required to perform specific activities, limiting their ability to optimize work schedules.
The next-generation prioritizing and scheduling tools are designed to answer the seemingly simple but incredibly important question every knowledgeable worker faces: ‘what is the best use of my work time this morning , today, this week? ‘. These tools will deconstruct work assignments and recurring work responsibilities into a more granular set of tasks. They will recommend work schedules based on past task performance patterns as well as business priorities and coworker needs. In addition, they will identify learning opportunities for skill development that will allow employees to perform similar tasks more efficiently in the future.
Work-life well-being
The global pandemic has forced knowledgeable workers of all ages to take a more critical and holistic view of their mental, physical and emotional health. Many do not like what they see. Over the past two years, they have generally worked longer hours, in more limited spaces, in sitting positions, staring at computer screens with limited delay and little or no physical interaction with co-workers. It’s hard to describe it as a healthy work environment.
Work well -being and personal well -being are two different things. Individuals may derive health benefits from their work life that are impaired or overwhelmed by bad homelife issues. Conversely, individuals can offset the effects of an unhealthy work life by gaining physical fitness, mentally stimulating, and emotionally satisfying at home. In reality, most knowledgeable workers devote too much time to their jobs for their work experiences so as not to affect their personal well -being.
Collaboration tools should bring a sense of order and coherence to the demands placed on time by a knowledgeable worker and should promote a sense of daily and weekly success. In today’s work environment, they all often contribute to higher levels of work-related stress and frustration.
Next-generation tools need to support a virtual-first workplace that takes care of the physical and mental hygiene of its workers by delivering information, taking time off, encouraging breaks. and providing distractions that relieve stress caused by meetings and messages from morning to dusk. Next-gen tools will give employees a greater sense of control over stressful aspects of their work lives by enabling them to establish schedules that reflect their personal preferences for performing differently. different types of work at different times of the day or different times of the week; to gather information that will make them better prepared for specific meetings or activities; to examine the opinions of co -workers on key questions or issues; and to obtain frequent performance feedback from business partners. While some of these capabilities are not direct forms of collaboration, they enable collaboration – when it happens – to be more meaningful and productive.
A CIO leadership opportunity
The capabilities seen in this article will have a revolutionary impact on the productivity and sanity of modern knowledge workers. With a little foresight and a lot of gut fortitude, CIOs can not only join this revolution, they can, in fact, lead it.
Many CIOs are genuinely concerned about the employee experience in today’s hybrid workplace. They have taken concrete steps to reduce IT friction by re-engineering existing procedures for employee onboarding, incident response, application provisioning, laptop retrieval, etc. While these efforts are commendable, their collective impact is not comparable to the revolutionary impact that next- gen collaboration tools can have on employee productivity and job satisfaction.
CIOs who are truly committed to transforming the employee experience and not just improving it have the unique opportunity to do so by being early users of new tools for communication management, prioritization and scheduling. work, and work-life well-being.
Author’s Note: the ideas presented here are based on Rethinking the Next Generation of Workplace Collaboration Toolsa wider white paper that can be downloaded here.
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