FUTURE TRENDS: NEW WORKPLACE INNOVATIONS

What’s the future of work – and what new workplace innovations will define it? Partners often ask us to research and provide deeper insight into these topics. Following are just a few subjects we’ve been consulting on lately, and brief overviews of our findings. As you can see, many changes are coming to the workplace – happily, we’re pleased to report that (even in a virtual and remote working world) most are for the better.

Topic: Build a Better Remote Work Policy

Scenario: Business owners are increasingly switching to remote, virtual, and hybrid work models – but they often lack the tips, insights, and best practices to design an optimal business policy, which should be codified.

Insight: It’s important to make team meetings a priority and communicate frequently with others, schedule regular reports and check-ins, establish expectations and responsibilities, set timeframes within which tasks should be completed and communications responded to, make wellness/well-being a point to take into account, etc. Simply turning employees loose to work from home without establishing guidelines is not the answer.

Topic: What Business Meetings Should You Skip?

Scenario: We’re all working harder than ever, and under greater pressure and time crunches – management teams and their employees should rethink how much time they’re spending in meetings, and whether doing so is productive.

Insight: Are key decision makers available, and is the meeting driving towards an actionable outcome? Is it a topic you’re well versed in or one where you could benefit from added insight, training, and feedback? Will more than 15 or so people be in attendance, limiting your ability to communicate and participate? There are some simple litmus tests you can use to determine whether you should be there or can grab the Cliff’s Notes version later.

Topic: 7 New Habits of Successful Organizations for 2021

Scenario: Business leaders can ensure ongoing growth, motivation, and innovation in their organization by instilling several important business habits.

Insight: In addition to encouraging creativity, leadership, and innovation at every level, it’s also important to give employees opportunities to grow, expand their horizons, and collaborate – especially using platforms and programs that let you do so at scale. Likewise, it’s important to constantly spend 20-30% of your time investing in the future, share feedback and insight (including into failures, which we can all learn from), and provide a wealth of learning and development opportunities to workers. What’s more, you also want to get folks to embrace the idea of the organization and individual as being constant works in progress, and instill a willingness to experiment and learn from new ventures, which they should be exploring regularly.