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The Future Of Digital Workspaces Means More Meaningful Collaboration

This article is more than 7 years old.

Why do we work in offices? You could cite a handful of reasons, such as having a visible “headquarters” for your brand or maintaining more control over employee schedules, but when it comes down to it, offices exist to encourage collaboration. We have board rooms to host meetings, break rooms to encourage teambuilding and camaraderie during downtime, and we maintain semi-strict hours (i.e., 9-5) to make sure everyone’s available in one place, just in case we need to ask a question or hash out a problem.

So what if there was a better way to collaborate? Would we need offices anymore?

The Illusion of Effective Office Collaboration

First, let’s take a look at some of the ways offices are “supposed” to function to aid team collaboration, but where they really end up failing, at least in some way.

  • 9-to-5 schedules don’t work for everyone. The 9-to-5 model is intended to help streamline productivity and get everyone available for collaboration during the same timeframe. Here’s the problem: not everyone works best on this schedule. Your morning-person employee won’t work well with your night-owl employee, resulting in miscommunications and even resentment if you try to force these interactions.
  • Availability often means interruptions. The ideal office environment is open—employees are in one location, so if you have to ask them a question or get their opinion, you can walk right up to them and do it. What’s the problem with that? It means all your employees are poised for interruptions at any time, from anyone, breaking their focus and hampering productivity.
  • Meetings for the sake of meetings. Meetings can be effective, but they’re often heralded as necessary elements for collaboration. In fact, most meetings end up doing more harm than good due to poor planning and less-than-stellar participation. It’s possible to “optimize” your meetings by planning them further in advance, but digital tools make it easier to collaborate in ways that traditionally only meetings could offer.
  • The digital/office hybrid. Today’s office landscape is strange, because it often involves traditional office motifs and norms with new, digital forms of interaction—when you want to reach someone, do you walk to their desk or message them? This ambiguity could be resolved with the introduction of a better digital workspace.

Digital Advantages

Let’s take a look at some of the ways a digital workspace could improve upon these disadvantages and lend a more productive and collaborative work environment—using today’s technology:

  • More flexibility. There’s objective evidence to show that greater flexibility for your workforce leads to higher levels of productivity, and digital environments provide that flexibility. Your workers can log on during the hours they feel most productive, engage with others at their leisure (thanks to new systems of communication that allow for delayed responses), and address items when they feel it’s most appropriate.
  • More communication channels. Digital environments offer far more communication options than a strictly physical office. Phone calls, text messages, and emails are just the beginning; there’s a medium for almost any need, like the increasingly popular communication platforms Slack and Basecamp.
  • Greater accountability. Because most digital interactions are recorded in some way (and modern project management systems are designed to keep track of progress and interactions), there’s a greater level of accountability in a digital environment. Your workers will participate more, and they’ll feel less pressure doing so.
  • Hands-on sharing. It’s tough to share items in a meeting—you usually have to rely on a whiteboard or openly discuss things to be worked on later. With today’s tools, you can share and collaborate on work—including documents and other files—instantaneously and simultaneously through systems like Google docs, Box or Dropbox.

The Final Obstacles for Digital Workspaces

Unfortunately, today’s digital workspace technologies are still somewhat limited, and there are a few more obstacles to address before we get to a point where digital workspaces are inarguably superior. Still, I think we’ll get there once we solve these major issues:

  • A lack of face-to-face communication. Face-to-face communication is still superior in many ways, and digital environments have yet to completely overcome this weakness. Video chatting is a good start, however, and virtual reality may soon catch up to our high standards of in-person communication.
  • No landmarks. You’ll lose out on the physical presence of your building, but that’s somewhat superficial and only contributes slightly to your team collaboration. As long as you have some way for your workers to identify themselves as part of your organization, that team morale can be preserved.
  • Norm ambiguity. Because the digital world of communication is still fairly new, there’s a lot of persistent ambiguity about what’s “normal” or what constitutes proper etiquette. It’s not always clear which medium you should use to communicate, or what standards you should meet while doing so. This is something that can only be corrected with time.
  • Perhaps the biggest hurdle is getting everyone in the professional world, particularly older generations, on board with the concept of a digital workspace. Because of this reluctance to change, it will likely be decades before we can fully transition to a digitally-exclusive work environment.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We’ve now examined some of the weaknesses of modern offices when it comes to collaboration, some of the advantages that digital workspaces can offer as an alternative, and a handful of obstacles that the digital working environment still needs to overcome. These problems aren’t solved yet, but the world is heading in a direction where professional collaboration will be most successfully hosted in a digital environment. This might excite you, or it might intimidate you, but either way, it’s the future of our working world, and if you want to adapt with the times, you should start preparing for it.