The Hottest Trends in Work from Home Tech in 2022 

Trends Driving Work from Home Technology in 2022

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The Hottest Trends in Work from Home Tech in 2022 
CollaborationInsights

Published: May 9, 2022

Rebekah Carter - Writer

Rebekah Carter

WFH (Work from Home) trends aren’t going anywhere. Although demand for remote working opportunities was enhanced by the restrictions of the pandemic, many companies are beginning to embrace more flexible employment opportunities as the ”new normal”. 

Before the pandemic, only around 4% of all-high paying jobs were available to remote workers. Now, this number has shot up to 15%, and the opportunities continue to grow. 

For employees, home working opportunities allow for more comfortable way to engage with the workplace, minimising complex commutes and time spent in distracting office environments. For employers, “WFH” initiatives attract more talent, improve retention, and even boost productivity. 

Of course, leveraging the full benefits of work from home opportunities means investing in the right tools and technology to enable remote staff. Here are the hottest trends in remote working tech.

  1. Employee Wellbeing and Empathy

Employee wellbeing is forecast to have perhaps the biggest impact on the workplace of the future in any professional environment. Over the last couple of years, employees have encountered several stressful issues and challenges detrimental to their physical and emotional wellbeing. As the concept of self-care becomes more crucial to many of us, we want to ensure the workplaces we’re returning to post-pandemic have our best interests at heart. 

Companies capable of supporting the wellbeing of their staff members are less likely to suffer from the side effects of the “Great Resignation” and more likely to boost productivity and engagement levels among all team members. Encouraging wellbeing in the age of home work includes:

  • Equipping teams with the right tools: Providing employees with everything from the right screens to protect their vision, to ergonomic chairs for their desks can help to boost wellbeing.
  • Keeping teams informed: Providing employees with guidance into how to manage their days to ensure wellbeing through apps like Microsoft’s “Viva” solutions can help to minimize feelings of stress and overwhelm at work. 
  • Prioritising regular video interactions: Regular video interactions between staff members can help to reduce feelings of isolation for people working from home.
  1. Team Collaboration Tools Become the “Work Hub”

Team collaboration tools are an important part of maximizing employee experience with the correct work-from-home tech in today’s modern landscape. These tools have provided staff members with a convenient and fast-paced way to stay connected regardless of where they are in the world. 

For work-from-home professionals, the right team collaboration tool can be more than just a system for chatting to colleagues, it can essentially be the central hub of the new virtual office. The ideal environment will be one that unifies all of the applications and tools a home working employee needs to use into one single pane of glass. 

Your UC and collaboration solution should integrate with the apps your employees already use, and empower team members to communicate quickly and conveniently across a range of channels. This environment should also make it quick and simple for team members to access information about the business, data they may need for tasks, and even training resources on-the-move.

  1. Enhanced and Engaging Interactions 

When team members are working from home, they have less access to the natural ad-hoc experiences and chance encounters they would typically have in a business environment. This increases the risk of team members feeling isolated, as well creating potential problems with creativity and engagement.

To empower teams and deliver a better employee experience regardless of where employees might be, companies will need to think about how they can make digital interactions feel more engaging and meaningful. Video is a good start for a lot of brands, as it can often be embedded into the UC work hub, and offer a great alternative to in-person face-to-face interactions. 

However, it’s worth looking into other ways of enhancing interactions too, like adding gamification elements to video communications, such as polls and quizzes, so people can feel more engaged during meetings, and bond with their teams. Empowering AI solutions to help capture information about employees so team members can access context prior to and during a meeting can be extremely useful too, particularly as cross-company collaboration becomes more common.

  1. VR Collaboration and Augmented Meetings

Speaking of making digital interactions more engaging and memorable, the rise of extended reality and immersive solutions could also make a huge difference to how empowered today’s work-from-home employees will feel. As remote and hybrid work grows more common, tools to connect employees on a new virtual level are becoming increasingly accessible and affordable. 

We’re already seeing an increase in the number of big companies creating virtual versions of their office environments, so remote employees can collaborate in a familiar environment. It’s also possible for some companies to access tools that allow users to enter virtual reality workspaces through their web browser, even if they don’t have a headset. 

VR, AR, and XR will open the door to a new age of collaboration for businesses in the remote working world, allowing for a new level of presence and immersion, similar to what we’re used to in the traditional office. Companies will also be able to augment meetings in other useful ways too, such as using AI devices to translate voices in real-time, or transcribe conversions. 

  1. Personalised UC Experiences

Finally, personalisation is rapidly becoming a more common consideration for businesses supporting work-from-home employees. It’s often difficult to ensure adoption of specific tools and technologies when you’re working with a remote workforce, distributed in locations all around the world. Not everyone in your team will have access to the same tools, or have the same preferences.

Allowing teams to have more flexibility over their choice of meeting applications, or hardware tools can allow for better levels of productivity and adoption in today’s teams. This is particularly true as work from home employees look for enterprise-level equipment to offer the same level of convenience and ease-of-use as their consumer grade technology. 

As environments for the modern “work hub” like Microsoft Teams become more open and adaptable, they will allow companies more freedom to safely allow their team members full control over the kind of technologies they use each day.  

 

 

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