Top Remote Collaboration and Productivity Trends to Watch Out for in 2022
We have been living through the most disruptive workplace in decades, and the pace of change will not slow down in 2022. Jason Lapp, CEO of Beautiful.ai, shares why leveraging more sustainable and productive team collaboration tools will be key to improving hybrid work in 2022.
It’s been nearly two years since the workplace changed for good, forcing many organizations to think on the fly to keep productivity alive. Tools like Zoom and Slack became the new means of communication. While those platforms played a major role in our new normal, they didn’t necessarily carry the burden of collaboration for so many organizations.
Hybrid work is here to stay and will continue to be the primary mode of communication for many. The challenge for companies now is to identify remote collaboration strategies that foster engagement and happiness instead of leaving people feeling burnt out, exhausted and overwhelmed. For organizations to remain competitive and successful, they must evolve with the trends. Below are a few ways organizations can engage clients and employees more effectively.
Key Trends of Hybrid Productivity in 2022
Changing patterns of video presentations
A few years ago, presentations used to look very different than they do now, for obvious reasons. But even before the pandemic, shifts took hold as digital tools entered the workplace. Now that the workforce is more dispersed than ever before, we established new habits for building presentations and sharing that information internally and externally. Instead of a packed conference room with catered lunch and a full day of events, there might be ten people in person and 200 employees on Zoom, and your presentation needs to reflect that.
Consider some of the following video conferencing trends and how they will impact remote collaboration and productivity in the coming year and beyond.
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Integration
It’s essential to be fast, efficient, agile, and accurate in today’s business world. Digital transformation is happening now, and companies that don’t stay on top of the trends will fall behind. Since business doesn’t happen in one spot all the time, keeping a hybrid or remote workforce connected and on the same page for great collaboration can be a challenge. It’s important to identify where different systems can be integrated into one platform, making each video call more meaningful and streamlining processes for business efficiency.
Gamification
For many months, the war for talent has been a hot topic of discussion: organizations inflexible about allowing remote work lost people to more receptive companies. But, just because those employees opted to work from home instead of in person, they need to be engaged with coworkers in the office. Gamification will be an important part of virtual communication moving forward. What does that mean? It can mean splitting into small groups for a competitive game, awarding stars or badges for participation on video calls, or just encouraging team members to use emojis to indicate their reaction to a presentation deck. Any activity that allows every employee to engage their coworkers in a fun, exciting way is an important one.
Privacy and Security
With more work happening online, more data is being shared, and more hackers access private information. Data privacy is always a prominent topic of discussion, from both a personal and professional standpoint, but ransomware has been particularly prevalent in the COVID era. Particularly for industries like healthcare, finance and law, innovations in cybersecurity will continue coming to light. They can potentially change the way video presentations and virtual work happen in hospitals, banks and law offices in 2022.
Virtual sales calls can win
Before COVID-19, it was typical for a salesperson to wine and dine potential buyers in-person, sharing presentations via a tablet or mobile device. But, through necessity and technological advancements, successful sales presentations are happening virtually. Without traveling to and from meetings with potential customers, more sales calls can happen, and more deals can be done every day.
Technology is augmenting and streamlining the sales process. To create a winning presentation, sales teams don’t have to be in the same room together every day. Collaboration and workflow management is simple and easy to handle with today’s software. In 2022, companies that achieve the highest hybrid productivity levels will embrace smart, collaborative presentation software that keeps everyone on the same page. The benefits are too great to ignore.
Learning & development
Today, it has never been easier to embrace remote learning and development. With more efficient tech, teams can conduct training virtually as opposed to spending days in week-long conferences or training sessions that require an employee to step away from their primary work. The venue has evolved, and so must your use of tools to enable high engagement productive sessions and allow employees to collaborate to share their ideas and feedback. Communications and meeting software should be at the forefront to increase the effectiveness of any meeting. This is important for both the employee and the HR teams responsible for building and delivering a program. Building program content with a distributed team should start with collaboration software designed to create content, leverage your team’s input and present in a dynamic environment. Productivity tools make it easy for them to build and collaborate on content. They also make it easy and engaging to improve the delivery of the programs.
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Embrace the future
We live in a hybrid world. Gone are the days of showing up at the office Monday through Friday. We exist in a digital-first environment. It was always bound to arrive — it just happened sooner than expected. Now, the focus cannot be on a return to normalcy. Instead, it has to be on where we stand now and predicting the next shift.
As we continue forward with our “new normal,” it’s time to focus on leveraging the technology and productivity tools we have at our disposal to become a more productive, efficient, engaged and happy workforce for 2022 and beyond.
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