How to shape the Future Workplace?

You must have read my blog post Social Media & Mobile Trends to shape future Workplace where I talked about the five major social media and mobile trends which will shape the future of enterprise mobility and change the workplace scenario. Here I will provide the inputs that an organization can adopt to shape the future workplace and keep it engaging enough for the new generation workers.  

• Design a Technology Philosophy: Each organization should have their own and unique technology philosophy that can be used to shape their workplace. For that you should know your employees’ technological and working preferences, understand the impact of your organization’s security and regulations on technology usage, and whether Internet and social media plays a role in driving customer engagement.

• Develop a new age Security Policy:  Gone are the days when you can have a single and inflexible IT security policy to prevent security breaches and data loss. Many organizations try to enforce a ban on the usage of personal device as a policy. But restricting the usage of personal device and social media applications won’t provide you with a security cover; in fact it will endanger you as your employees will find ways to surpass those defunct rules and regulations. Hence develop a security policy that covers employee owned smartphones, tablets and PCs in addition to the organization owned devices. This will provide flexibility as well as prevent security breaches and data loss.

• Liberalize your rules & regulations: More rules and regulations leads to disgruntled and dissatisfied workers. Do away with rules like prohibiting the usage of employee owned personal devices and technology in the organizations’ network. In fact, encourage employees to use their own devices like smartphones for business usage. Today, more and more employees prefer to use their own smart phones for office usage; do not stop them from doing so, but do develop ways to keep them security enabled.

• Provide tech to enable employees’ integration & collaboration: Launch and provide your employees with enterprise applications that enable them to collaborate and work closely with each other. Provide your employees with social media tools and internet facilities that enable them to communicate the way they usually do. In nutshell, take advantage of the technical trends to increase employee engagement and productivity.

• Adopt Desktop Virtualization & other new tech:  Organization should be open to adopt desktop virtualization and other new technologies. It will not only enable employees to work on different devices, but will also allow employees to access organization data in a flexible and secured manner.