The way in which organizations work has evolved. Both work styles and the workforce are becoming more and more diverse. There are several trends – and challenges – that we’re seeing.
When people collaborate today, they leverage social tools– 45% use social technologies in their day-to-day work3.
Users also work across more devices – in the past five years, the number of devices per user has increased 400%.4 The mobile phone has completely changed how we communicate and work. Many users live on their phone. In addition, people use different apps and services resulting in them having to jump between different experiences during the day.
The workforce itself is more diverse. For the first time, there are five generations together in the workplace, – all with different background in technology and different expectations about communication and collaboration tools. For example (hold up phone if available), some people are comfortable chatting on a phone, others prefer e-mail, or face to face.
Team sare increasingly geo distributed. Employees are no longer necessarily in the same office, let alone the same time zone. Per IDC, 72.3 percent of employees will be working remotely by 20205, making it more challenging to have face-to-face conversations. There’s a greater need to enable communications and collaboration – regardless of geography.
There is also a movement towards transparency and inclusivity in how decisions are made. Organization structures are becoming more flat. People are on twice as many teams as they were five years ago.1
And those teams are dynamic. It’s rare that people don’t change on a multi-month project. And when someone leaves, the first step is for all to go through their e-mail to find the information needed to get the new person up to speed.
Being on more teams has also led to a dramatic increase in the amount of collaboration. The new way of work is team-based and collaborative. Workers report that 80% of their time at work is spent collaborating.2 (i.e. in meetings, calls)
Microsoft Teams was built in response to these communication and collaboration trends in the modern workplace. We’ve seen that Teams really thrive when information is shared in an open and transparent way and when people with diverse workstyles can access information easily. We’ve built Teams to enable that.
We’ve also seen that there is no one size fits all. We’ve built teams to be flexible and so that you can customize and personalize it based on the needs of your team.
What happens when you don’t provide tools to support these new workstyles? End users simply download the consumer grade tools to do the immediate task at hand. This creates friction for end users as they have to manage multiple logins and move between different experiences, and it creates risk for the organization as shadow IT develops.
[This video illustrates the problem with fragmented, best of breed solutions and is included for your background knowledge only, not to show in the customer meeting.]
