What constitutes a ‘modern workplace’? It’s hard to come across an exact answer, if indeed one exists – but the office as we know it has transformed hugely even in the last two decades.
Just cast your mind back to the early Noughties, when cubicles were largely done away with in favour of “open plan” layouts. By the mid-2010s, offices were strewn with ping pong tables and similar perks – and, just a few years later, the pandemic made remote working mainstream.
All of this begs the question: which workplace trends from the past should your firm stick with in order to please its employees in the here and now? Here are four features you should deem essential to your workplace.
Remote access to IT facilities
Naturally, you should make sure your on-site workers are able to securely access all of the IT resources they need. However, while the pandemic lingers, many of your employees won’t be on-site. Therefore, you also need to implement remote digital access for your home-based staff.
You should do some research to discern whether or not these workers have sufficiently fast internet access for their corporate needs. These workers will also need remote devices – either personal devices or ones funded and handed out by your company.
The right work collaboration tools
Teamwork is crucial to business today, and can be facilitated reassuringly easily by work collaboration software that would enable your workers, including remote ones, to share such assets as documents, files, spreadsheets and data with co-workers quickly and seamlessly.
However, you should be careful which work collaboration tools you choose for your workforce – with such productivity suites as Microsoft Office365 and Google G Suite well worth considering.
As revealed in statistics shared by ZDNet, the average organisation of 100,000 people has between 1,500 and 3,000 applications – and even a 100-person organisation will rely on 100-200 applications.
Health and fitness amenities
“Hang on,” you might be thinking, “are these really essential?” You would be in the minority, however – as many workers today would indeed value not having to leave their corporate premises for a nutritious snack or reinvigorating workout.
According to the Fellowes Workplace Wellness Trend Report cited by Forbes, a huge 87% of workers surveyed for the research would appreciate their current employer offering a range of healthier workplace benefits – such as ergonomic seating, wellness rooms and healthy lunch options.
A cloud contact centre
As ITProPortal reports, millennials will make up almost 75% of the workforce within the next five years – and this demographic segment is thoroughly acquainted with working on the move, using mobile, cloud and social solutions to make this possible.
For reasons like these, you should think seriously about moving many of your company’s applications and processes to the cloud. If you aren’t certain where to start, you could implement an all-in-one system like Gamma’s cloud contact centre solution Horizon Contact.
Once up and running, this cloud-based system would be accessible to authorised users from any suitably internet-connected device and place – making remote working even easier.