Remember the mimeograph machine? When was the last time you send a fax? Or the stacks and stacks of paper from old 1970s office photos?
We haven’t yet achieved a truly paperless office. However, we are getting closer thanks to the digitization of the workplace. Apps and smartphone technology are the latest waves of tools to make sharing information quick and easy. The technologies are encouraging greater employee collaboration, information exchange, allowing employees to provide guidance or seek help on a real-time basis from their peers or superiors and also engage with customers effectively.
Millennial employees are more tech-savvy and willing to adapt, eager to learn new techniques and even take risks. But they detest being constantly monitored or kept confined to their desks or not being allowed the freedom to choose where they want to work from. They want to work in an open, liberated environment and not behind iron curtains. As more millennials enter the workforce, employers can utilize new technologies to better address employee engagement across departments.
A digital office uses technology to make the organization and workflow more flexible and it always puts employees before everything else. It is an ecosystem that determines how people work and engage with others using technology, how value is created that passes through the entire value chain, and how it benefits its stakeholders.
Digitization of a workplace improves the efficiency of the workflow as employees always have the required information at their fingertips and there is less rigidity in the system. The smaller HDDs are far more efficient than desktops and laptops and give employees the confidence and convenience of using their own devices at the workplace. Speed of information exchange has also greatly improved and the policies have been made employee-centric as companies have realized that a job is a part of a larger lifestyle for the employees and shouldn’t be encompassing.