In 2021, Let’s Emphasize Humans In Workplace Tech

The enormous challenges of 2020 forced businesses across all sectors to pivot quickly and profoundly. Technology was — and remains — the catalyst for those transformations. But as we saw more of each other’s lives through video calls, we were also reminded that behind the screens are fellow human beings trying to cope with unprecedented challenges.

This speaks to why, in 2021, the CIOs best equipped to manage through and beyond the pandemic will leverage technology that recognizes the human experience of what we’re all going through. And they can do so by embracing three key trends that will shape much of their work for months to come.

Using Tech To Nourish Experiences

Soon after Covid-19 hit, B2B interactions became increasingly (if not exclusively) digital. Underpinning this shift was a powerful trend in buying behaviors that saw B2B customers expecting to be “treated as partners and not targets,” as Forrester wrote about. In other words, B2B customers sought customized experiences to help them adapt to — and, in some cases, simply survive — the pandemic. They didn’t want a constant onslaught of generic sales pitches about why they should buy more stuff.

The value of technology in nourishing those experiences will continue to rise in 2021. A Forbes article this fall suggested that more and more companies would adopt personalized, omnichannel strategies to engage customers who are increasingly turned off by broad-brush approaches to marketing. The success of such strategies depends, in many ways, on having flexible and resilient IT platforms to help deliver personalized experiences.

I believe CIOs in the vanguard of providing excellent customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) in today’s “all digital, all the time” economy will take their organizations through and well past the next stages of the pandemic. Those who can’t, won’t.

Offices As Tech-Centered Collaboration Spaces

Some people may have already come back to offices, and more will likely do so in 2021. But when they do return, things will be much different. Instead of having offices and meeting rooms spread out randomly across floors, I expect these spaces to be reimagined as tech-centered collaboration spaces.

These spaces should be designed on a digital-first basis and configured to blend in-person interactions with remote connectivity in order to stimulate collaboration and innovation in equal measure. For instance, smart boards and high-quality cameras will need to be numerous and well positioned for discussions with colleagues and customers regularly joining in from around the world. Team members using technology to increase their engagement in their work and to get to know other people better should be at the center of this approach.

The pre-Covid-19 days when no one really knew how to turn on the camera in a meeting room on those rare occasions when someone was working from home are long gone. Conference rooms designed for live interaction on a physical whiteboard with a terrible remote experience are no longer acceptable; they should be designed with remote-first thinking. Video rapidly became the bloodstream of interactions last year. In 2021, hybrid collaboration (i.e., physical and digital) could be the default for many organizations. From an IT perspective, this kind of hybrid collaboration requires an innovative IT infrastructure. And that planning and funding should start now if it hasn’t already.

Applying Tech-Based Insights To Leadership

Whether they’re working from home, from the office, or some combination thereof, team members are increasingly using a range of tech platforms to work together. Over the last several months, I’ve seen many CIOs, in turn, use sophisticated workplace analytics from these platforms to gain deeper insights into the world of remote work in the Covid-19 era.

Microsoft ran an experiment in 2020 to analyze how work patterns evolved within their organization in 2020. They did this by using Workplace Analytics to measure what they called “everyday work in Microsoft 365,” as well as anonymous sentiment surveys. The findings were fascinating. For example, weekly meeting time increased by 10% overall, but individual meetings shrank in duration. They had 22% more meetings of 30 minutes or less, and 11% fewer meetings of more than one hour.

Generating analytics like these invites greater collaboration between CIOs and chief people officers (among others), as the former can provide the latter with metrics-based insights into the habits, attitudes and productivity levels of team members across the organization. Consider all those video meetings we’re all having these days and how you could use metrics to measure the timing and duration of those calls. If your data shows a trend toward meetings happening well into the evening, this could inform corporate policies to restrict them to daytime hours or allow leaders to design better employee engagement policies. Leaders who do this could not only help keep people motivated and productive but also help curb attrition.

People are exhausted. And while “after hours” is a very elastic term these days, meetings during or after dinner can add to everyone’s fatigue. And they can build resentment. Armed with robust workplace analytics, CIOs can help their organizations place greater emphasis on the mental health impacts of working in a pandemic. You could think of it as natural human empathy bolstered by empirical data.

By extension, CIOs operating in this way can demonstrate their leadership in technology and tap into the vital — and often overlooked — emotional intelligence skills required to understand and motivate colleagues in stressful environments. The fact is that this “softer side” of leadership could be increasingly important for CIOs in 2021 not only on a human level but also because of the sheer fact that IT teams will be asked to do even more — perhaps with less — than they did in 2020.

Putting The Human Into Tech

CIOs did an incredible job last year of transforming their organizations at a pace and scale that was simply unimaginable only a year earlier. But it won’t stop. If anything, it will get faster and bigger in 2021. This year, their ability to put the human into the technology will make all the difference.

Source: Forbes