Collaboration Trends and the Future of the Digital Workplace

Collaboration is good business. Studies observe that companies who prioritize collaboration increase their performance substantially over companies that do not. Moreover, collaboration, in addition to being a good team performance strategy, makes good practices visible, further driving performance. It is, therefore, an optimal business strategy.

Trends in Collaboration

• Technology. Technologies abound that enable sharing and networking.
• Demographics. Millennials, tremendous users of digital, will make up 75% of the workforce by 2025. Generation Z, coming behind them, has never known a non-digital world. Digital practices enable collaboration between offices, and between employees at the office and those who work at home.
• A flattening of the organization, from the pyramid structure of yore to a more team-like model in which team members approach the leader in terms of importance — or can become the leader, depending on the approach.
• Increasingly flexible workplaces. Remote workers are likely to constitute more and more of an organization's total. Teams comprised of both remote and physically present workers will become more and more common.

Digital Trends That Enable Collaboration

1. Cloud services keep replacing company-specific platforms. One crucial reason: cloud services are viewed as able to keep up with proliferating security threats more effectively, and they can be more cost-effective and more flexible.
2. Immersive group collaboration platforms ("next-generation whiteboards") keep spreading, largely because they allow on-premises workers and virtual ones to communicate — seen and used by both groups of employees at the same time.
3. Video streaming is used more and more in both customer-facing areas and internal corporate processes. Employees can record videos as well as management, and video is increasingly used for security purposes.
4. Team-based messaging. Instant messaging, video chat, and calling are more likely to be team-based rather than individually based, with team messaging apps increasingly standard for business.

Collaboration is good business and allows for the capture of good ideas and good processes. Many trends in collaboration partake of digital innovation, and trends for the future will enable technology to make even more of a contribution.