Louis Tetu is CEO and Chairman of Coveo, which enables enterprises to deliver experiences that are relevant, highly personal and valuable.
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Despite the continued uncertainty around the pandemic, planning for office reopenings and adapting a new workplace model is still at the top of the priority list for most business leaders. Every company will tackle reopening in their own unique way, but most of the plans I’ve seen include a few common elements like flexible remote work policies and vaccination protocols.
One thing that’s being overlooked in many office reopening plans? Optimizing workplace technology architecture for our post-pandemic, digital-first world.
Companies across all industries have been forced to go all-in on digital to adjust to the various challenges of the pandemic. This includes retooling architecture that empowers employees with information and data access, implementing technologies that enable employees to work from anywhere on any device and adopting countless digital collaboration tools, from video conferencing to chat. Productivity has been at the center of the workplace narrative for years, so most of these digital initiatives have aimed to boost efficiency. But what about proficiency? The ability to do more on their own.
In a remote, distributed workplace and an era where talent is scarce, businesses need their employees to not just be efficient but proficient. And one of course leads to the other. Workers need to be able to handle more and more complex situations on their own with higher quality outcomes.
Proficiency Impacts The P&L
For the business top and bottom line, the benefits of a more proficient workforce are significant: higher quality results, more innovation, greater customer satisfaction, and fewer escalations. This is because more employees can complete tasks of higher complexity, requiring fewer employees to complete the same overall task volume, thereby increasing efficiency.
A focus on proficiency can also lead to a better employee experience. When they have the tools and information enabling them to do more independently, workers feel empowered. They know that their time is valued and that they have the opportunity to grow in their careers by gaining more knowledge and skills and by driving better outcomes. This, in turn, can have a positive impact on retention because of greater employee satisfaction and success in their roles.
Being able to empower the new hybrid workforce with the knowledge they need to do their jobs, in the flow of work and wherever they work, is key. Knowledge is not data, content or information. Knowledge is a human ability to exercise judgment when facing a new situation.
How AI Workplace Technology Supports Employee Proficiency
The good news is that business leaders have all the information needed to create a more proficient and relevant employee experience. Companies are sitting on a treasure trove of knowledge about how their employees interact and behave because most interactions are now digital. They simply need to put that existing data into action to identify trends and understand how to deliver the most effective information to every employee in the right context. Intelligent workplace technology and infrastructure can empower employees by giving them easy access to the tools and information they need to get their jobs done.
This is where AI comes in. AI powers the ability to personalize and contextualize content to understand what is relevant and what might have worked for others in similar situations. AI-powered workplace relevance ensures that the cognition process — the process of acquiring knowledge — is as efficient and effective as it can be.
Traditional intranets no longer cut it. We are seeing a rise in intelligent employee self-service, where workers can access relevant information and even get prescriptive advisory content right in the flow of work. Some organizations also combine in these employee portals personalized corporate, HR, information technology or sales and marketing information.
It’s not enough for these portals to be merely a collection of links to applications or a central repository of content. People want relevant answers in smart snippets that are context-aware and unified from anywhere across the enterprise. Search and keywords have moved to recommendations and AI. Persona has moved to persons. Responses have moved to prescriptions.
The Post-Pandemic Workplace Will Be Defined By Relevance
I expect the transition back to the office to be just as complex and challenging as the transition to full-time remote work — and it will look different for every company and every employee. There are countless factors to consider and bold decisions to be made, including technology decisions and the adoption of AI. Having an empowered and independent workforce can help tremendously.
With the right digital infrastructure, we can ensure the new workplace strategy focuses on supporting higher proficiency, not just efficiency.
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