How changing workforce demographics, tech advancements are redefining work cultures

Survival of the fittest – that this aspect of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution today finds the most common application in the global business landscape is hardly surprising. Technological advancements over the last twenty years have ushered in a new, always-connected era where organisations across the globe have two options: either adapt and keep pace with the rapidly-changing tech ecosystem or perish. As a result, more companies are actively leveraging technology to generate greater value by optimising operational efficiencies and exploring completely new avenues of conducting business.

This paradigm shift has given rise to tech-led work cultures which tap into the digital wave to drive greater flexibility, collaboration, and productivity within workplaces. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and the human factor, these new-age enterprises are bringing about positive changes in processes, people, and competency models. They are accelerating business activities, lowering operational costs, improving go-to-market times, and enhancing end-consumer outreach. But what is causing such a drastic transformation within such a short time span? The answer lies in two words: Millennials and Technology.

Digital natives in a tech-led workplace

No other generation in history has shaped the global business landscape quite like the millennials have in recent times. They wield enormous – and growing – influence as consumers, early adopters, and empowered digital natives. They have used this influence proactively to define market trends and business dynamics. Their innate familiarity with state-of-the-art tech means that they are extremely comfortable interacting with technology and often champion new solutions that add value and efficiency to their day-to-day functioning. They are also assuming a bigger role within the workforce; recent industry studies expect millennials and post-millennials to cumulatively account for almost 60 per cent of the global working population by 2020, and 75 per cent by 2025. With an ever-increasing number of business leaders and working professionals belonging to this demographic, it is hardly surprising that workplaces are being metamorphosed to meet the evolved millennial sensibilities.

Technological innovation has also played a major role in driving the transformation of conventional workplaces. For example, the way that critical business information is shared amongst employees within organizations. Instead of physically transferring files across departments, offices, and geographies, the new-age workforce is demanding solutions that go beyond the desktop and reach every business user at their preferred point of access, anytime, anywhere, across platforms.

This growing requirement for swift, seamless, and hassle-free collaboration and information sharing is what advanced solutions like Barco ClickShare are fulfilling through their tech-led approach. These device-agnostic wireless solutions are revolutionising the meeting room experience by enabling business users to share content from their laptop, tablet, or smartphone on a large screen at the touch of a button. Such enhanced information sharing helps in improving meeting room productivity — one of the most critical business challenges for corporate organizations — and facilitating better decision-making through access to data. A culture of collaboration is also nurtured within organizations through this BYOD-led approach, which allows everyone, off-site and across geographies, to interact with each another more easily. This is something which resonates with the millennial workforce and blends into their way of functioning.

Organisations across the world are also making great use of artificial intelligence and its various applications to optimise processes. Traditionally, most professionals tap into the intranet or email their manager for answers to everyday business questions. This approach is inefficient, time-consuming, and often redundant because, in today’s workplaces, employees not only need to find information quickly but also need to implement insights from that information to complete tasks swiftly and precisely.

This is why chatbots are enjoying growing popularity as curators and facilitators of data and are touted to completely transform the way people access information at work within the next decade. Similarly, the integration of digital assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Echo in smart homes is giving rise to the question – can they be used to take care of the more mundane business functions, such as recording the minutes of a meeting? As digital workplaces become smarter, there is likely to be a parallel evolution in such smart devices that allow for improved functionality aimed at optimising business operations.

With tech now defining and redefining the very fundamentals on which the world operates, successful companies are not only finding ways of doing things more efficiently through tech-led solutions but are actively exploring completely new avenues of conducting business. The modern connected enterprise is digitally empowered, and its workforce happier, more engaged, and more productive. The changing employee demographics and the growing technological penetration are giving rise to a work culture that revolves around the core tenets of the millennial ethos – that of collaboration and efficient growth. Businesses which will embrace this dynamic will survive and thrive to lead the future of the global business landscape, while those that don’t will become a footnote in its history.