Digital Workspaces: Virtual HQs for the New World of Work

The rise of remote work is transforming how and where work is done.

Technology enables seamless collaboration across geographies, allowing for greater flexibility and work-life balance. Organizations are rethinking traditional office setups and embracing remote work as a permanent feature.

McKinsey asks ‘What is the Future of Work?’ and explores a detailed analysis of the trends that span remote work, digital business models and increased use of AI in the workplace.

They see a continuing adoption of remote working however suggest there are still limitations to this, where key activities like negotiations, brainstorming, and providing sensitive feedback are activities that may be less effective when done remotely. Therefore it’s best addressed through clear identification of the tasks best served by this approach, and employing approaches like ‘hybrid working’, and they recommend executives build strength in five areas:

• Expand executives’ focus on strategic clarity, coaching, and empathy. The leading driver of performance and productivity isn’t compensation or stretch goals but rather the sense of purpose work provides to employees.
• Foster outcome-based management of small, cross-functional teams. This is both more human and more effective as performance management practices shift from being about controlling employees’ work to empowering and enabling teams and people to perform.
• Increase talent velocity, especially with reskilling. Being able to staff teams across organizational siloes is a hallmark of agile models.
• Find new zero-cost, high-optionality ways to collaborate. It can help to define a model to increase how quickly your organization can discover and adopt better modes of collaboration, both physical and digital.
• Increase the rate of technology adoption. It’s imperative for companies to seek out new tech and use data to drive optimal results and make better decisions.

Most notably they emphasize the critical role of HR in leading this new culture and working models. Although HR was once considered a stodgy support function, it’s now poised to serve as a strategic partner to the business, as relevant to success as R&D, sales, or production.

Unily

A Digital Workplace is a platform that provides the functionality specifically intended to address these requirements.

They facilitate a “Virtual HQ”, an online environment where employees can connect, share expertise and collaborate, encouraging and enabling employee engagement, and also apps that further augment this such as employee morale surveys,

Unily is one vendor offering a Digital Workplace solution for this purpose, that builds on Sharepoint and natively integrates with 365 services like OneDrive files, and then offers application features for engaging employees and improving culture, like on-boarding workflows, team member recognition and surveys.

In their Youtube video archive they share talks and presentations focused on building a high performance culture. In this roundtable their leaders explore the overall core challenge of how to get the balance of hybrid work right.