Do you still remember the olden days when people worked in offices? Being there was essential because that’s where you could find all the things you needed for your job. The advent of resources that make asynchronous communication possible (e-mail for example) hastened the end of this era. And that's a good thing since, if there’s one part the productivity equation that’s become irrelevant, it’s location. It’s no longer the place, but the collective goal that counts. Staff can now be virtually anywhere and perform exceptionally.
The result is that work and leisure time are increasingly intermingled during the day. A situation that requires a very different approach to work, along with other requirements, from employees. Flex-working and mobile working, together -- regardless of time and location -- can lead to a huge increase in productivity, subject to compliance with a few caveats.
However, one of the greatest threats to a modern collaborative work strategy for companies is connection. Exchanging information is difficult without location-independent access to a centralized work environment. The growing popularity of cloud-based environments is not surprising, especially in a country like the Netherlands, where a good internet connection is almost self-evident. Another major threat to mobile working is concentration. Thus, working in a train compartment full of talking people can prove quite a challenge.
Offer the best conditions for knowledge-sharing: optimal access, optimal equipment
In order to be able to meet the requirements of the employee who wants to work everywhere, the conditions need to be created to make it possible. That means a virtual office environment accessible anywhere in the world and supported by apps that enable communication between colleagues. According to recent study(1) the desire for such an environment is enormous. Ninety percent of respondents said they heavily lean on chat applications such as SMS, Slack, Skype, WhatsApp and WeChat, to be able to work well together. Seventy-two percent cannot do without collaboration applications such as, Jabber, Skype for Business or Webex. But even with these tools, optimal communication is still not guaranteed. One of the most powerful communication tools that man possesses is his voice. When two people communicate with each other and can’t see each other, the voice becomes responsible for as much as 87 percent of the information(2). Speaking clearly and listening carefully is, therefore, essential. This underlines, once again, the importance of the best equipment to allow a flex employee to be understood perfectly, and vice versa. Distracting background noise definitively belongs to the past.
In Short
Since technology stimulates this sort of cooperation to encourage knowledge sharing, it quickly becomes the breeding ground for a culture of information exchange: better customer experience, success stories, faster help, and more. This means that the collective knowledge grows and creativity flourishes with a faster time to market as the ultimate result. But in order to be able to truly enable a team to work everywhere, it is of the utmost importance that they be provided with equipment that makes it possible: the kind of equipment that ensure concentration, and allows for clear conversations.
(1) Plantronics Mobile Collaboration Global Survey, 2016
(2) Albert Merabian and Morton Wiener, “Decoding of Inconsistent Communications,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 6 (1967): 109–114.
