All it took was one virus to ravage the economy and upend billions of people’s work habits. The ensuing economic crisis is cause for concern, but it’s not the end of the world…
Solutions exist.
Switching to the Digital Workplace is one of them.
A crisis that is changing the way we work
When COVID containment measures began back in March, IT teams and CIOs were mobilized like never before. The widespread use of teleworking—for those who’ve had the option, was indeed a sudden and profound change for many companies and millions of employees.
This upheaval promises to be long-lasting, as teleworking is still strongly encouraged by the French Ministry of Labor.
For the past eight months, CIOs have been heavily involved in:
- rapidly deploying collaboration and communication tools
- strengthening the security of IT infrastructures
- enabling and supporting deployment of teleworking systems (which will most likely continue to exist in the long term)
Also read: Shadow IT: The Sword of Damocles Hanging over Companies
Given the challenges it presents, this crisis can therefore be a breeding ground for opportunities for digital teams. Like the economist Schumpeter, who referred to crises as moments of “creative destruction,” the times we live in are conducive to innovation and the creation of new work habits.
Digital to the rescue
A study published byAppDynamics toward the end of May 2020 clearly shows the predominant role played by digital technology in the response to the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, almost all the companies surveyed (95%) have changed their technological priorities to respond to the pandemic. These changes directly concern CIOs. At the time of the study:
- 87% of CIOs saw this period as an opportunity to prove their value to their company.
- 86% of CIOs wanted to make teleworking tools sustainable.
- 80% of CIOs believed that the IT department’s response to the pandemic had a positive impact on the perception of digital in their company.
- In France, 76% of CIOs said that digital transformation projects had been implemented in a few weeks, instead of a year under normal circumstances.
These figures speak for themselves: it is thanks to CIOs and digital tools deployed in record time that many companies have been able to cope with COVID-19 and continue their business.
Among these digital tools and solutions, the digital workplace naturally occupies a place of choice, and for good reason: in one and the same work environment, it brings all the functionalities that have enabled companies, collectively and remotely, to overcome confinement.
Also read: The Digital Workplace: The Tool that Makes Teleworking as Easy as 1-2-3
The digital workplace: an ideal solution for flexible working
The digital workplace is a truly digitized, individual office. It’s an all-in-one work environment that brings all the applications used by employees on a daily basis together on a single platform.
The digital workplace is thus the ideal solution to keep your business running during the current crisis. This is all the more true since in 2017, a study conducted by Umanis already showed that three out of four companies already had confidence in the digital workplace approach.
Indeed, the digital workplace offers many advantages :
- It ensures remote access for all your employees to their working documents, thus ensuring business continuity while teleworking.
- The digital workplace centralizes all documents in a dedicated cloud space and offers everyone secure access, anywhere and anytime.
- The digital workplace brings together all the communication and collaboration solutions needed to work together remotely.
- It guarantees a better employee experience.
- It promotes knowledge retention and sharing.
The digital workplace thus offers a very appreciable flexibility, which will find its usefulness well beyond the current crisis. Indeed, the change in working methods already under way has accelerated under the COVID effect, establishing one thing for certain: the flexibility provided by companies between face-to-face and remote working is here to stay.
Also read: What are the Best Digital Workplace Solutions?
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Want to take the plunge into the digital workplace? The Talkspirit team is ready to help you! Contact us to find out more.
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Author: Paul Maubareyt
