Enhancing employee and customer experience in a hybrid world

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen organizations across the APAC region shift their ways of working and embrace a remote work model. While pandemic conditions will continue to evolve, what will remain is employees’ desire for a hybrid work approach. Technology may be enabling this flexibility that workers demand, but it now also adds layers of complexity to business operations.

We recently hosted a webinar - Staying Ahead of the Digital Workplace: Enhancing Employee and Customer Experience in a Hybrid World – which explored the evolving trends and challenges in remote work, digitizing work processes, growing business profit, and what the future of work looks like in 2022.

Here are the key insights for business leaders:

Automation and Augmentation: The two key changes technology is making to business

Digital transformation is improving productivity, streamlining processes, and empowering collaboration. As the digital economy continues to accelerate, executives need to understand the role technology will play across all business functions.

Adobe partnered with Faethm, an AI company that uses technology to understand the impact of technology across different organizations. Two key factors emerged as the drivers of change: automation and augmentation.

Rapid advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence technology is helping to automate the mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing up individuals and teams to spend more time on tasks that require more human, creative skills. Equally, technology is helping augment those human skills and capabilities to make jobs and processes more efficient and simple.

As businesses look to the future, they should rethink how they assess the skills and capabilities of their team. Where previously employees needed a focused core set of technical skills, now the emphasis should be placed on creative skills like critical thinking, collaboration and insights.

Businesses are adapting to rapid technological change, but advantages aren’t equally felt

While technology can help to create efficiency, capacity and improve productivity, its impacts will be unevenly distributed across the workplace. According to Faethm, over the last 15 years, the top 10 per cent of individuals with the right skills have managed to grow their incomes, while the upskilling of the remaining 90 per cent has remained fairly flat.

It is becoming clear that the businesses who invested in technology early have excelled, while those that were slow to adopt have been left behind.

As the digital divide grows, roles such as operations, will be particularly affected through automation. Scott Rigby, Adobe Chief Technology Advisor for JAPAC says that within operations itself, there will be further inequality, with 11.6 million females impacted by technology, opposed to 5.2 million men.

To accelerate, business executives should commit to understanding technology’s impact across the organization as well as smaller demographics such as gender and age. To reduce the inequality digital transformation causes, businesses should also look to upskill or diversify skills within roles that cannot be automated.

2022 is an opportunity for businesses to change the world through digital experiences

It is unlikely that organizations will return to ways of work that reflect a pre-pandemic time. The opportunity now is for business leaders to provide a full mix of technological capabilities to empower employees in a flexible hybrid work model.

A key method to empowering employees through hybrid work is through the seamless integration of digital processes. One example, The Adobe and Microsoft Portfolio partnership has created an end-to-end platform helping businesses to create content, collaborate and execute while working remotely.

The end-to-end platform is helping businesses to improve productivity, enable document automation and remove the manual task of paper processes.

As connectivity from home continues to remain paramount, these technological advances will be enablers of the biggest change. The ability to connect and collaborate anywhere in the world will open opportunities for businesses to be able to reach a wider audience of potential employees and consumers.

There is no doubt that the future is technology. It is time for business executives to set the agenda for future technology investments, de-risking business and preparing for unexpected events.

Click here to watch the full webinar.