Designing a Productive Knowledge-centric Workplace for the Modern Age

For months leading up to the start of the pandemic, some of the most exciting conversations in business focused on the future of work and sweeping digital transformation initiatives powered by advancements in AI, automation, and robotics. Then the pandemic hit, and the future of work is NOW. But the way we work today is drastically different compared to anything we ever could have imagined. Indeed, AI and other emerging technologies still shape many trends but enabling remote or hybrid work has eclipsed all other priorities and now dominates conversations. 

Gartner coined the new era of work as the “everywhere enterprise,” describing an organization that uses technology, team structures, processes, skills, and tools to empower a dispersed workforce, harness a distributed infrastructure and serve a ubiquitous customer base. And this model may indeed become the norm. Forrester predicts seven in ten companies will significantly expand their “anywhere-work” program post pandemic and estimates about 60% of large companies will choose a hybrid workforce strategy. 

See More: Lessons Learned: 3 Actions To Take if You Manage Remote Teams

The decentralized workplace is here to stay, and it comes with its own set of growing pains and challenges. 

Content Chaos, App Splintering, and Knowledge Drift

Collaboration has always been critical to corporate success, but it’s harder with a dispersed workforce. Not only is it harder, but collaboration also happens differently when people aren’t in the same office. With collaboration considered the cornerstone of remote and hybrid work, collaboration tool adoption has increased by 44% since the pandemic began. Nearly 80% of workers are using collaboration tools for work in 2021, up from just over half of workers in 2019, according to the Gartner Digital Worker Experience SurveyOpens a new window . 

As a specific example, Microsoft Teams saw a huge uptick in use during the pandemic, rising from 20 million users in November 2019 to 44 million in March 2020, then 75 million by April. According to digital experience management company AternityOpens a new window , Microsoft Teams usage growth surpassed Zoom from February to June.

But it’s not just these general-purpose collaboration platforms. Remote work means a greater need for structure in workflows, and many applications have appeared to optimize specific processes. But more isn’t always better. Some organizations are experiencing negative impacts from application proliferation and information overload. According to a surveyOpens a new window fielded by APQC in partnership with Sinequa, 50% of respondents have confusion over where information is stored, and 45% say there are too many disconnected systems. 

Remote work has made information harder to find for some. Sinequa’s surveyOpens a new window of knowledge workers in 2020 revealed that finding information was a key area that suffered, with the majority of workers (61%) reporting they found it harder to find information at home compared to their office or workplace. On average, employees lose 34 minutes a day searching for information, which amounts to three and a half weeks – almost a full working month – of wasted time for every employee each working year.

Additional researchOpens a new window by Sinequa highlights another issue: duplicate work. A recent survey of 250 IT decision-makers in the UK revealed that 96% of employees have to search across multiple applications to find what they are looking for. Thirty-nine percent that use a communication tool end up resending information once a day or more, and nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) resend information two or more times a day. 

The Great Resignation, a term describing a massive number of employees leaving jobs amid the pandemic, is further degrading effective knowledge management as peer-to-peer sharing diminishes and corporate knowledge walks out the door with the employee.  

In this new world of work, it’s crucial that workers are connected with the information, expertise, and insights they need to get the work done. 

Designing a Productive, Knowledge-centric Workplace

Developing a digital workplace strategy requires focusing efforts on three major topics: collaboration, structured processes, and data management. Collaboration involves not only communication, both formal and informal, between teams and employees but also empowering employee engagement. Structured processes focus on establishing a secure, stable and adaptive workplace infrastructure to support business operations and innovation. Finally, data management must include not only secure storage of a company’s valued data assets but also the ability to effectively find and share information and knowledge throughout the organization.

Building upon that three-part framework, a well-designed tech stack for the knowledge-centric organization should include: 

• Team collaboration/digital workplace applications
• Knowledge graph/relational databases
• RPA/automated workflows 
• Intelligent/AI-driven search that can also recommend knowledge assets

The ‘new normal’ of remote and hybrid work amid the fallout from the pandemic has made enterprise search a priority if it wasn’t already. However, enterprise search has traditionally been a tough nut to crack, marred by issues related to the difficulty of extracting meaning from unstructured text, content and system proliferation, the splintering of applications across the enterprise, incorrect and incomplete metadata, security challenges and above all, extremely high user expectations that demand that enterprise search perform as well as, or better than, a Google search (demands that, due to differences between Internet and enterprise content, don’t carry over to the workplace). 

See More: 3 Trends to Know About in 2022 to Structure Your Organization to Scale

Thankfully, enterprise search software has grown more sophisticated and powerful over the years. Intelligent search platforms break down information silos by allowing employees to search quickly and easily obtain the information they need from multiple data sources and applications within their organization. With the infusion of AI and machine learning, finding relevant results is better than ever, and tailored user experiences powered by search deliver business value not possible with non-search technologies. And thanks to powerful integration with collaboration software like Microsoft Teams, intelligent search solutions enable workers to find the information they need wherever the information resides inside the organization, within the flow of work.

With these elements in place, the intelligent search platform has become a key success factor in the development of a knowledge-centric corporate culture that boosts employee productivity, speeds innovation, aids in compliance and risk management, improves responsiveness to customers, and increases organizational knowledge development and sharing for competitive advantage. 

What steps have you taken to create a productive knowledge-centric workplace for the modern age? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .