How to Build Your Workplace of the Future

Sponsored by HP®

The workplace of the future is about using technology to empower your employees, no matter where they are located. We’re here to help walk through some insights into this new landscape and some of the adjustments that can be made to keep your businesses running.

Are you able to adequately adapt your structures and technologies to give your employees what they need to succeed? Our preconceived notions about how to work and what a workplace even means are being questioned; employers need to understand the challenges of their employees and how best to solve them. Growth and change are never easy, especially during tumultuous times like these. We have been propelled into a situation of real-time learning and executing on these new necessary procedures that will be important not only throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but far beyond it.

Challenges of Remote Work

For many businesses before COVID-19, employees working from home was a rare occurrence. Maybe it was just for a half day because of an appointment, or someone had car trouble and couldn’t commute to the office. Working from home always seemed like it would limit our capacity to communicate – the ability to pop by someone’s desk for a quick question when email wasn’t cutting it and seeing co-workers in person would be lost.

Now after 3+ months of working remotely, we’ve made some good strides forward in these new conditions that would not have been possible without technology. However, the adjustments have not been painless. According to a recent study:

• 73% of employees interviewed say they need to be able to share content during a meeting, but fewer than half say they’re able
• 70% employees interviewed say they need good audio quality, but only 40% are satisfied with what they have now

Outdated and hard-to-use technology is a major day-to-day stressor that impacts productivity and overall employee satisfaction. Providing the tools and systems that not only solve these base-level issues but also improve communication, collaboration, and flexibility is one of the most important challenges for current and future workplaces. Unfortunately, these situations can’t have one-size-fits-all solutions – they must be tailored to each organization’s needs to be successful.

The Path Ahead

To move forward – analyze your business, talk to your employees, and work to find user-centric solutions to make everyone’s technological processes as accessible and clear as possible. Use this time as an opportunity to explore how your concepts of your workplace and workforce can evolve. Now that we’ve seen how remote work is possible, we have the chance to expand our horizons and bring on new ideas and talent that we may not have previously thought about. Take a look at this workforce engagement white paper from HP® and Harvard Business Review to read more about these new developments and what will be expected from future workplaces.

However, the workplace of the future won’t be fully remote. We need to adapt our physical spaces to provide a safe working environment for those times that in-person work is necessary, or preferred. From social distancing your space, to adding signage around your building to remind employees and visitors of new policies, there are many adjustments that need to be made. Tech products are a huge piece to this puzzle, including finding touch-free tools to you use in your new “clean tech” office. Since we rely so much on our tech to work, finding ways to limit exposure to high-touch tech surfaces will be crucial:

• Add more printers to your workplace and assign specific people to use each one to spread out traffic flow
• Provide supplies and instructions for effective sanitizing after each use
• Reduce the spread of germs with keyboard coverings and other antimicrobial office supplies

Check out this this HP® article for more responses and adjustments that have been made to adapt to the changing workplace. Explore our selection of HP® products to find what you need to enable the success of your workforce no matter where they are located. Through sharing predictions and insights from industry experts we’re here to help you move forward to the hybrid model of remote and office work.