Future of Work Collaboration Innovation for a Joyful, Engaged Workforce

Introduction

As workforces get increasingly distributed, across locations and time zones, team productivity becomes a major differentiator that separates the digital leaders — or what IDC calls “Future Enterprises” — from the rest of the pack.

Indeed, IDC’s research shows accelerated growth for new communications platforms, tools, and services. The enterprise collaboration market is projected to top almost $27 billion by 2023, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4% between 2018 and 20231.

This IDC InfoBrief, in partnership with Lark, throws the spotlight on today’s workspace collaboration imperative to unlock the power of teams. Team collaborative applications are fundamentally changing today’s siloed approach to work and bringing out the best of one’s employees. A collaborative environment enabled by an integrated platform of tools enables individual creativity to flourish and fosters a shared purpose.

With smart connected devices, such as smartphones and laptops, outnumbering people, enterprises are focused on driving mobility across their people and processes. The goal: to gain greater cost efficiencies, improve customer service, and, importantly, to raise workplace productivity.

Preparing for the new benchmark: The Future Enterprise

Today, a digital divide exists between organizations that are digitally transforming and those that aren’t seeing the results due to factors such as siloed organizational structures and silos of innovation. Organizations that are ahead of the pack in terms of digital transformation maturity demonstrate the ability to vision, plan, and operationalize digital transformation (DX) to become “Future Enterprises”.

This report defines the Future Enterprise as an organization that successfully thrives with a digitally native culture, effectively competes through their ecosystems, generates revenue from empathy at scale, and demonstrates an ability to adapt operating models to complex customer requirements; all of which are enabled by an intelligent, empowered and agile workforce.

Six Trends Impacting the Workplace

Future Enterprises have a singular holistic strategy that focuses on how digital transformation can turn their organization into an innovative powerhouse to compete in the digital economy. Hiring, motivating and training people will be the sustaining difference for successful digital transformation. Here are six key trends impacting the workplace and calling for new workforce strategies.

1. New Age Workforce

By 2024, 50% of structured repeatable tasks will be automated and 20% of workers in knowledge-intensive tasks will have AI-infused software or other

digitally connected technology as a “coworker”.

2. Coworking Influence

Coworking will account for 30% of all office spaces by 2030, transitioning from a complementary subsector to a key component of the office and

commercial real estate space.

3. Growing Voice of Millennials in the Workplace

By 2020, more than 50% of the workforce in Asia-Pacific will be millennials.

4. Contingent Workforce to Address Scarcity of Digital Talent

45% of Asia-Pacific organizations surveyed have implemented or are planning to implement contingent or project-based hiring policies to fill the digital skills gap.

5. Cloud-first Approach

Organizations are favoring solutions that bring work in one place. By 2022, more than 85% of the worldwide team collaborative applications market will reside in the cloud.

Barriers to a collaborative environment

Several challenges stand in the way of the vision of a truly intelligent, empowered and agile workforce. Despite the wide availability of messaging tools, social networks apps, and conferencing platforms, workers are still working largely in silos. As team productivity takes center stage, siloed workers cannot contribute and deliver value.

Barrier 1:

Email, still the dominant medium for information exchange today, is increasingly too static to cater for team collaboration for an effective workplace.

Barrier 2:

Shadow IT. On average organizations use 4 different apps and 3 different service providers, which means IT must deal with interoperability challenges. Coexistence of multiple collaboration apps have the potential to lead to siloed communications and hamper real-time employee collaboration.

Barrier 3:

Messaging, chat and apps overload as employees use anything from email, chat groups, personal apps, and social networks to get their office (and personal) work done throughout the day.

Barrier 4:

Organizational culture and hierarchy that doesn’t promote information sharing and trust. In some workplaces, employees can get through the day without any face-to-face communications.

Driving efficient team collaboration in the Future Enterprise

Future Enterprises are organizations that are able to achieve “digital at scale” across their operations, innovating at a pace that is an order of magnitude greater than traditional businesses.

To that end, team collaborative applications play a key role in helping organizations streamline workflow and engage employees, partners as well as customers.

Case Study: An emerging esports company needed a solution to simplify its communication and collaboration workflow for faster delivery of content to consumers.

Business Challenge:

The old calendar application was not in sync with its communication tools and was ill-equipped to organize meetings.

Business Solution:

After adopting Lark, the company was able to streamline all communication and workflows in one platform, providing a seamless user experience for employees, and improved accuracy, which resulted in reduced labor costs.

Country Specific Deep-Dive

Australia

Hypercompetition continues to drive Australian organizations to adopt 3rd Platform technologies, such as cloud, social and mobility, to reinvent the way they engage with partners, customers and employees for sustained competitive advantage.

According to IDC’s Future of Work 2018 survey, almost 30% of organizations believe there is a scarcity of digital skills and are using a combination of targeted hiring practices and training to address the talent shortage.

In-house capabilities will help drive key projects, but creating policies and structures that facilitate collaboration with the broader ecosystem will maximize DX business outcomes.

Collaboration and enterprise messagingtools rank among the top 3 digital technologies thatAustralian enterprises have already implemented, reflecting the importance of enabling team collaboration.

China

The pace of DX continues to gather speed in China as organizations in the mainland invest in new digital technologies to transform or disrupt the market. Despite their transformational efforts, a majority of China organizations are at a digital deadlock, according to IDC’s DX MaturityScape benchmark.

The market has reached a point where organizations are rethinking DX and looking to realize value from their digital projects to reinvent customer engagement, operations, leadership, and the overall workplace.

The reality is that DX is a team sport. Organizations that foster and enable collaboration are well placed to reduce the gulf between strategy and execution.

India

Collaboration is getting a major thrust in India, one of the top 3 contributors in the Asia-Pacific region’s software market.

Collaborative applications and, more specifically, messaging platforms are witnessing rapid adoption in India as organizations are looking to harness and maximize their IT investments to accelerate their digital transformation.

Indonesia

DX has become a top agenda for most Indonesian enterprises whose goal is to transform their operating model and business processes to fast track business growth.

Cloud has become and will continue to be, a core technology to drive future innovation, especially among SMBs to reduce operating costs as well as enhance productivity and efficiency. Effective communications and collaboration will be key to driving productivity and innovation within and outside organizational borders, a trend that is also fueled by the rise in coworking in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital city which is projected to outrun Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020.

In Surabaya, Bandung, and Pontianak, where cloud services are highly utilized, IDC believes that as the number of Smart City projects increases, the demand for cloud-related services and application solutions will likewise increase, driving greater DX innovation.

Japan

Enterprises across the globe are making significant DX investments, with DX spending forecast to reach $1.2 trillion in 2019, an increase of 18% over 2018. Japan accounts for close to 7% of worldwide DX spending, according to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Digital Transformation Spending Guide.

Amid the pace of transformation, 40% of Japanese organizations surveyed are still exploring workplace transformation and modernization, and have yet to make concrete plans, according to to IDC’s Future of Work 2018 survey.

With DX impacting all lines of business, Japanese organizations that foster collaboration will be well placed to overcome silos of innovation that invariably take root in organizations.

The goal to digitally transform will drive further investments to foster and enable new levels of workspace collaboration.

Malaysia

Like the rest of its ASEAN neighbors, Malaysia has DX high on the agenda. IDC predicts that 66% of Malaysia’s GDP will be digitalized by 2022.

Two out of three Malaysian organizations are either planning their DX strategies or actively implementing DX-related projects to improve customer experience, enhance workforce efficiency, and develop new revenue streams and business models, according to IDC’s C-Suite Barometer Survey 2018.

Instead of questioning whether they should migrate to the cloud, Malaysian organizations are now analyzing the impact of not doing so. Many, including SMBs, are shifting their IT spend from on-premise license-based software to cloud-based software, particularly collaborative applications, customer relationship management, and human capital management applications.

But there is more to be done, as 13% of organizations are still exploring and have yet to make concrete plans to modernize their workspace, according to IDC’s Future of Work 2018 survey.

New Zealand

The DX landscape has changed in New Zealand over the past few years. A majority have progressed beyond experimenting with digital technologies and proof of concepts, with several major DX technology deployments from industry leaders at scale.

By 2020, at least 55% of New Zealand organizations will have attained capabilities to transform markets and reimagine the future through new business models and digitally enabled products and services. This means having dedicated capital spending, planning, and execution resources for DX.

Amid the pace of transformation, 15% of New Zealand organizations surveyed are still in the planning stages or have yet to make concrete plans for workplace transformation and modernization, according to IDC’s Future of Work 2018 survey.

Philippines

The DX momentum is picking up, with more than one-third of enterprises in the Philippines seeing themselves as having reached an advanced level of DX maturity. However, obstacles to greater transformation remain.

Among the biggest obstacles to progress is not technology per se but gearing the company culture towards transformation and securing commitment fromthe top levels of leadership.

IDC believes that DX success is directly related to the creation of the right working environment and empowerment of employees. This means equipping staff with new digital skillsets and catering for the working preferences of millennial workers.

According to IDC’s Future of Work research practice, millennials will be the backbone of Philippines’ digital economy. Around 60% of the country’s population is under the age of 30; this age group is set to be the largest group of workers in the Philippines by 2025.

Singapore

Singapore’s strong infrastructure and organizations’ rapid adoption of the latest technologies makes it a hotbed for digital innovation.

In 2018, the island-state took the number 1 spot in terms of cloud readiness in the Asia-Pacific region, reaffirming its place as a digital leader. Despite Singapore’s fast-paced adoption of DX initiatives, 23% of organizations surveyed see themselves as lagging behind their global peers, according to IDC’s Asia-Pacific DX Executive Sentiment Survey.

Almost 50% said that their DX initiatives are short term in focus. Successful transformation does not depend solely on technology or vision; the level of internal and external collaboration is also key, as silos remain a key barrier to success.

The reality is that DX requires close collaboration between various business units, breaking down silos of innovation. About 13% of Singapore organization surveyed are still exploring workplace transformation and modernization, and have yet to make concrete plans, according to IDC’s Future of Work 2018 survey.

Thailand

More than half, or 58% of enterprises in the ASEAN region, are struggling to progress in their DX journey, according to IDC’s research.

Like the rest of its ASEAN counterparts, improving Thailand’s digital economy and connectedness is one of the next key drivers for economic growth. The government’s fiveyear (2017-2021) investment plan, amounting to THB1.5 trillion for the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC), is one of the mega projects aimed at giving the nation a much needed infrastructure and technological boost.

Comfortable with the use of mobility solutions, online tools, file sharing, and social collaboration, the growing millennial generation of employees have brought significant change in the working environment and culture.

IDC expects the utilization of cloud-based solutions, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based enterprise apps, to continue to grow among local organizations in Thailand.

Vietnam

Like many of its regional counterparts, the Vietnamese government is pushing the DX agenda in a race to realize its Smart City ambitions.

Its egovernment plans are being rolled out to develop its cities and provinces, aligning with the national master plan toward 2030. Cloud adoption is underpinned largely by projects in state-owned companies, with growing usage among startups and businesses that are eyeing digital innovation.

Vietnam has voiced its plan to upgrade the labor force and adopt digital technologies to improve the overall competitiveness of its human capital. According to IDC’s research, the demand for cloud-based collaboration tools and file storage is on the rise as organizations see the value in enhancing workforce mobility.

According to IDC’s Future of Work Survey 2018, more than 30% of Vietnamese organizations are already deploying workspace transformation initiatives, while another 13% are planning to do so in the next 1-2 years.

12 Questions to Understand the Needs of Your Organization

Adoption is key to the success with any collaboration software. It is only effective if everyone on the team is on board and using the same collaboration tools.

Choose a collaboration tool that is easy to use and fits your organization’s team culture and goals.

With all this in mind, these 12 questions, arranged from macro in scope to micro will help you guage just how ready your organization is to adopt a company-wide all-in-one collaboration tool.

1. What are your teams’ culture and goals?
2. How formal or informal will collaboration be?
3. How does your team handle communication and workflow?
4. Will all discussions be related to work on specific projects, or will some be social?
5. Will all conversations be archived?
6. What other platforms and apps does your team use?
7. Will project managers or team members, or both, be collaborating?
8. How many people and departments will be collaborating?
9. What types of projects do your employees collaborate on?
10. What are the steps of a typical project?
11. How does the tool handle integration?
12. Where do you store project files?

Key Takeways

We believes that communication and collaboration apps are becoming increasingly important to enterprises globally. To keep up with the demographic, technology and cultural changes in the workplace, it is imperative to shift from an erstwhile email control to a dynamic, real-time communication and collaboration-based model.

We recommends these next steps for chief human resource managers and business managers:

• Develop a framework or mechanism to monitor employee experience and appropriately change workspace technologies, devices and policies.
• Deploy comprehensive talent management policies to ensure attraction and retention of best talent.
• Enable workers to work from anywhere, anytime. Implement appropriate BYOD/CYOD initiatives, and deploy employee-focused mobile applications, unified communications and collaboration technologies.
• Security, compliance, and governance are key elements in any collaboration platform selection. Ensure to adhere to the data encryption, data loss prevention (DLP) options, GDPR, employee privacy policies.