The modern workplace as we know it is still in its infancy. It’s changing each day — evolving with innovation and adapting to fluctuations. Yet, expectations are at an all-time high. Today’s talent pool is ultra-selective about where it will invest its time: 70 million workers are discovering the value of flexible work, and Gallup reports that 60 percent of remote employees and 30 percent of hybrid employees are “extremely likely” to change companies if not offered remote flexibility.
Many businesses have quickly adopted hybrid-work models, but not all have the right technical solutions to cultivate and sustain a future-proof workplace. As integrators step in to help employers design competitive workplace experiences, implementing the right content management system (CMS) can drastically alleviate the pressure. By selecting a customizable, easy-to-work-with, and dynamic platform, you can help your enterprise clients remediate communication challenges, enhance their employees’ experiences, reinforce company vision and values, and unite their workforce.
Unified Communication for Distributed Workforces
Eighty-six percent of employees and team leaders cite poor communication strategies and a lack of collaboration as the leading cause of workplace failures. This becomes especially relevant when evaluating hybrid teams. Due to the new communication barriers presented by distributed work, enterprises must seek solutions to strengthen and connect their teams in this new mixed reality. The problem isn’t a lack of meetings — workers are having more meetings than ever. However, they aren’t necessarily connecting with people outside their teams, collaborating spontaneously or reinforcing messages and priorities outside of meetings. As the hybrid-work model permeates the business landscape, enterprises must intentionally plan how to maintain communication between colleagues and across departments.
With a robust enterprise CMS, you can help streamline your customer’s space management, collaboration and corporate messaging into a unified portal. In a hybrid environment, any CMS should integrate with popular collaboration software platforms like Teams, Zoom, WebEx and Google Suite. The communication tools can be combined with advanced space management, hotdesking and room-booking tools to drive engagement onsite without excluding remote team members.
Team members can plan to be at the office together and reserve workspaces based on their meeting size, goals and technology needs. They can also invite remote team members and replicate face-to-face collaboration with suitable AV and conferencing solutions. Ideally, workers should be able to book meetings from any screen, including room signage, desktop or mobile devices: This flexibility encourages ad-hoc and cross-departmental meetings.
When a team produces powerful insights or sets critical strategic priorities, a user-friendly CMS makes it far easier to propagate those messages to the whole workforce. In an enterprise setting, you can empower administrative and leadership teams to manage and delegate content updates by granting team members tiered administrative access to the CMS. As the expert, you can offer to retain full administrative access for remote monitoring, management and troubleshooting or identify a dedicated resource internally to oversee the system and make strategic decisions to benefit the company.
Driving Productivity with Accessible, Engaging Solutions
Many workers note that flexible or remote work increases productivity, but these results do not occur organically. Workplace studies report that inadequate technologies and “switching costs” — time spent toggling between workplace apps — are significant barriers to workplace productivity: Without access to updated, streamlined tools to complete their job, employees spend more time making their workplace technologies work for them rather than making progress. When access to apps, information or training materials is discrepant or fragmented across in-office and remote teams, employees must work harder to find answers to their questions, access resources or synchronize across departments.
The right CMS will allow you to build data visualizations and KPI dashboards surfacing critical information from across your customer’s application stack. Such systems can save your customers thousands of hours per year that would otherwise be spent sifting through analytics from multiple systems to understand project status and team performance. However, you need a CMS with a deep API stack to avoid onerous customer coding. Every business has unique requirements, ranging from proprietary to industry-standard platforms. The right CMS must support the most popular tools and the unique essentials for any industry, trade or customer.
A deep bench of native APIs will also help you create greater parity between onsite and offsite work experiences. With a CMS that connects to all your client’s workplace tools, you can create workplace-application dashboards that can be deployed to conference rooms, hotel/hot desk locations and remote desktops. Employees can access the same workflow anywhere, reducing the “switching costs” associated with changing physical location as they move from a home office or a hot desk to a meeting space.
Of course, one of the main reasons employees go to a physical office is to gain access to unique spaces and technology. The right CMS can also help employees use these resources more efficiently and productively. I recommend pushing training resources to a meeting room’s idle screens and collaboration devices as “screen-saver” content. Users get access to the training resources they need to operate the system the moment they walk into the room, reducing helpdesk calls and troubleshooting time.
Relieving Growing Pains with Future-Proof Scalability
We’ve seen just how quickly business technologies evolve and become outdated. Future-proof software for content management, space management, collaboration and digital experiences is essential for enterprises to remain competitive in today’s business landscape, but not all CMSs are created equally. Some clients may see a new CMS as a risky investment. Will it work with future technology expansions? Is it hardware agnostic? Will it support the business as it grows?
“Yes” should be your answer to all these questions. Any CMS you recommend should exceed your current requirements to accommodate future changes. It should evolve with the growth of your client’s business and keep up with the constantly changing standards of modern work. This guarantees that the platform remains valuable in the long run, contributing to the organization’s progress and preserving your reputation.
What’s more, the CMS shouldn’t add strain to your clients. Luckily, content maintenance doesn’t need to be intimidating. A customizable backend with templates can provide visual consistency and branding across solutions without requiring complex programming or professional assistance for updates – making rebrands and updates simple enough to handle in-house without significant resource allocation.
Users can benefit from a centralized backend by using analytics tools that monitor various aspects such as space use, meeting engagement, and responsiveness to messaging. This enables businesses to create a data-based content strategy and maximize their team’s capabilities.
In today’s competitive talent marketplace, businesses must prioritize flexibility, connection and productivity among their workers. Integrators are uniquely positioned to support enterprise success amid these transformations, and the time to take advantage of the business opportunity is now. Paired with your deep understanding of the technical requirements of communication and workplace technologies, a robust CMS to support modern workplace challenges can help you address clients’ pressing business-communication challenges while growing your project portfolio.
Explore the 22Miles Modern Work Environment whitepaper to learn how to optimize resources, improve efficiency, and foster innovation for today’s fast-evolving enterprise.
Tomer Mann is chief revenue officer at 22Miles.
