The Need for a Hyper-Collaborative Modern Workplace

The modern workplace is changing. With shifting demographics and an increasingly dispersed workforce that spans the region or the globe, the definition of workplace collaboration is changing as well. What used to be regular face-to-face meetings in the boardroom have been replaced by video-conferencing, instant messaging, file-sharing or other such collaboration tools. A survey[1]by Microsoft found that 62 percent of Singapore employees consider themselves mobile workers and spend 20 percent of their time working outside of their offices; yet only 37 percent feel empowered by their organizations’ culture and managers to be able to work together productively and collaboratively.  

Organizations need to take notice and provide the necessary collaborative environments to support the changing needs of their workforce in order to stay competitive and retain talent. Apart from organizational culture, availability and compatibility of communications devices in addition to collaboration software are most important to fostering a hyper-collaborative modern workplace. In an age of a distributed, global workforce, organizations must find the right way to let workers conduct business as if they were in the same room to support workflows and ensure a truly seamless, productive collaboration experience. 

Choosing the right solutions for your usage model

In a sea of varied unified communications tools – traditional telephony and video-conferencing, subscription-based Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) plus other cloud-based file-sharing solutions and combinations of the above– how are organizations to choose the most suitable solution?

The first step would be understanding how your people typically work together, and then match those use cases to the appropriate solutions:

• Large groups might benefit from whiteboards that allow participants to view and edit content in real time as they automatically save, transcribe and distribute content via touch-enabled mobile PCs.
• Small teams in compact spaces are ideal for wireless solutions that connect securely to conference room projectors, enabling mobile PCs to connect automatically to share work.
• 1:1 collaborators can create virtual meeting rooms for high-quality audio and video using touch-enabled mobile devices such as 2-in-1s that allow for easy screen sharing and document editing.

Successful transformation stories

WWT helped a university in the US put in place a student-teacher collaboration solution to accommodate its growing population of online and international students. Without an IT-led collaboration strategy, university department heads had taken it upon themselves to close the technology gap, purchasing collaboration tools outside of IT. The multiple collaboration tools meant IT was receiving calls to support technology they didn’t know existed within the university’s environment. WWT held a collaboration workshop with the various IT stakeholders and department heads to understand their needs, then set up quarantined test environments to compare a variety of solutions, and finally led a series of training workshops to ensure all lecturers and students were familiar with the new, unified collaboration solution.

Put it to the test before implementation 

As seen from the above example, technological solutions and tools, while great on their own, need to work together with existing systems in order to fully realize their benefits. Technologies that don’t sync will just mean more headaches for IT and lead to organizational inefficiencies, or worse still, cybersecurity loopholes that may prove costly in the future.

The only way for organizations to make the right investment is to test them out first. IT needs a place to validate whether or not different leading solutions will work in their environment regardless of delivery models. They also need to compare the ease of administering services, upgrades and tweaks in configurations.

The WWT Collaboration Labsare available to our customers worldwide. This is a self-service, scalable environment that allows collaboration administrators to test performance, functionality, migrations and upgrades. It also demonstrates differences in end-user experience for competing tools. In Asia, customers can make use of our collaboration labs through the Asian Integration Centre (AIC)located right here in Singapore.

The Collaboration Labs includes more than 60 solutions such as workforce productivity, customer experience, interoperability and lifecycle management.

We can spin up customer environments in the lab within seconds thanks to advanced automation. From there, customer engineers can see, for example, how Cisco Meeting Server can facilitate seamless meeting participation for clients such as Skype for Business (cloud and on-prem), Polycom endpoints, Jabber, Webex and Cisco TelePresence.

Customers can kick the tires on the latest and greatest collaboration offerings in WWT’s Collaboration Labs without the traditional cost of building a lab in-house. WWT’s Collaboration Labs give you a safe place to familiarize yourself with disruptive technologies without disrupting your business. 

Has your organization made the transition to a modern, hyper-collaborative environment? How has it helped your work? Comment below to let us know your experience with implementing or using collaboration solutions in the workplace.

[1]Asia Workplace 2020 Study, Microsoft, Sep 2017.