Collaboration in the new era of hybrid environments

As I’m writing this article, the news in my part of the world seems to be taking on a much more positive note. Amenities are opening up again, people are more free to come and go as they please, and a general sense of relief is in the air. That said, with all that we have experienced as a global community over the past 18+ months, we know that things can change in an instant.

Perhaps that’s the greatest lesson of the 21st century thus far—that the ever-present need to adapt and overcome is now what the “New Normal” truly represents.

Obviously, it’s great to see millions of people migrating back to office environments and once again embracing in-person interactions. However, as everyone moves back to the office, the home or remote environment is not going away—not by a long shot.

According to the latest data in the Remote Work & Compensation Pulse Survey (published in May of this year), 48% of participants said they wanted to be fully remote. As for employers, 51% stated they supported the hybrid work model, while only 5% indicated fully remote work as a possibility.

So where does that leave the business world? The reality is that work as we once knew it is now a distant memory, replaced with a new-found ability and realization that work can and will happen from anywhere and everywhere. It’s for this reason that organizations must rethink how people collaborate—and, most importantly, reconsider the systems and platforms enabling collaboration to happen.

That is easier said than done. Maintaining the ability for seamless collaboration, let alone workforce efficiency in the hybrid era, is not a home-grown fix. A third-party platform is the only answer.

The goals are simple: organizations need un-siloed workflows to create and maintain organizational standards to streamline management, collaboration, and tracking; as well as the ability to maintain continual insight through notification functionality to ensure workflows, deadlines, and more are continually maintained.

But with so many disparate solutions to choose from, organizations continually struggle—particularly as workflows, processes and integrations become highly siloed and incompatible outside of single departments. This means internal and external users immediately suffer from slow, unorganized interactions.

That, however, does not have to be the reality. If organizations decide on the appropriate platform—one that makes the entirety of the aforementioned goals easy and devoid of complexity—enabling seamless management of collaboration across disparate offices, dispersed teams and multiple environments can be an easy reality.