As recently ranked number 4 in Australia’s Great Places to Work awards, 2021, Atarix has been recognised as an employee-centric modern workplace. Here are our unique insights that can help shape your organisation’s understanding of these trends, how essential employees are to SMEs ability to scale, the best practices to implement a modern workplace and how the modern workplace will shape the future of work at SMEs.
- Hybrid work is a relatively new term that’s here to stay. Having society now acclimatised to remote work, it’s looking like the future of work will blend what we traditionally knew as those four to five days in an office versus the five days at home. Offices are now downsizing, so businesses have recognised that they don’t need all that floor space they previously did because staff can still work remotely and come into the office when needed.
- Online meetings. Everyone either hates or loves online meetings. During the peak of the pandemic, video calls were used more than ever before and what used to be a regular phone call, became a video call. Whether we like it or not, video interactions will replace phones as we advance. Businesses have started investing in better meeting room experiences, whether it’s one-to-one or one or many, time is valuable, so you want meeting experiences that begin and run on time. You don’t want to be fiddling around with the sound or the video and the camera, you want the meeting room experience to be smooth.
- Cybersecurity. Whether you like it or not, cybersecurity is becoming more prominent in any discussion around technology, primarily due to the scramble to work remotely with the arrival of COVID-19. Everyone picked up their laptops and IT teams scrambled to make their environments secure with increased cyber threats; whether they had the right skill sets or not, they did the best they could. Off the back of pandemic, there are many trends around looking at what we did in the last 12 months. Did we do it right? How do we make sure it’s secure? And then, how do we make sure that we’re building the proper cybersecurity controls so that staff can work remotely, work flexibly without having to think about securing the business data. That’s a big emerging trend.
Once you’ve tackled those three workplace trends, you’re set with the right foundations, operating a modern work platform. What that lends itself to is automation and AI. Whether you have thought about it in the past, adapting to the pandemic meant that you had to have a digital presence.
An example, think about accountancy. Previously, you had some firms that had digitised and who transacted with all clients online, but also had your traditional businesses that required walk-in scheduled meetings to do that business transaction. As a result of COVID-19, those traditional businesses had to adapt their processes. From here, the next milestone is automation. Previously, automation wasn’t accessible to small businesses, and only enterprises could afford that sort of technology.
Small businesses can adopt automation and AI when you’re on a platform, such as Microsoft 365. And, when you think about automation, you suddenly think, oh no, does that mean our staff are no longer redundant? No, it means that the team can then focus on less repetitive, less mundane tasks and more on the client interactions, driving higher business value, in that we see staff and their roles changing as a result of the trends coming out of COVID-19.
Have questions on how to create seamless collaboration within your organisation, to give your employees the best experience possible? Contact us here or call 1300 ATARIX for a complimentary consultation with our Senior Cloud experts.
About the Author
Tony Tran
Through 18 years of experience, Tony has learned there’s no I in TEAM. Tony’s motivation comes from leading the team to tackle complex problems, simplify them and deliver awesome results for clients.