The ongoing evolution and expansion of the Digital Workplace has been highly evident throughout 2023. It has continued to play a pivotal role in successfully enabling remote working, transforming the modern office into a geographically dispersed yet unified space, and thus powering the hybrid working trend that continues to support many sectors. Broader factors, including the global Climate Emergency, the escalating Cost-of-Living Crisis and inflation, along with geopolitical conflicts and wars, will exert their influence on the Digital Workplace throughout 2024 as well. As organisations and businesses strive to remain cost-effective and competitive while addressing evolving employee expectations and needs, alongside the persistent challenges of skill shortages, the significance of Digital Workplace technology will continue to grow. Additionally, its role in ensuring employee satisfaction, retention, and talent attraction will become increasingly vital.
Trend 1: Intelligent use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning for the automation of suitable tasks
By using automated systems that utilise AI or machine learning, laborious or time-consuming and repetitive tasks can be automated, giving workers more capacity for more productive tasks. The market for AI will grow globally from $298,246.87 billion US dollars in 2024 to $1,847,495.6 trillion US dollars in 2030. Nearly half of workers (45%) predicted AI would cause a “significant” change to their jobs in the next year, whilst more than a third said they felt overwhelmed and worried by these changes.
[1] Therefore, the deployment of automated systems needs to be done intelligently, ethically, sensitively, and carefully to ensure it enhances the productivity of workers whilst respecting their rights, and the wider opinions and concerns of society.
Konica Minolta is currently working on integrating more AI into its
Intelligent Information Management solutions. The aim is to enable even more automation to relieve employees from arduous, time-consuming tasks, for example in the document capture process, where zonal OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which first requires extensive training, is to be replaced by AI, which no longer requires any training to extract information from documents. Konica Minolta is also currently working on individual OpenAI services for Summarising, Synthesising, Coding and Excel spreadsheet analysis. These can be used, for example, to automatically summarise documents, provide support in the brainstorming process or make forecasts.
Trend 2: Data privacy and security
The EU's NIS2 Directive (Network and Information Systems Directive 2022) came into force on 16 January 2023 and is to be enshrined in law in all EU member states by 17 October 2024. It aims to strengthen the cyber resilience of European operators of critical infrastructure and essential services. In view of the continuing threat – cyberattacks increased dramatically once again in 2023 in particular (weekly cyber-attacks have increased worldwide by 7% in Q1 2023 compared to the same period last year, according to Check Point’s latest research report
[2]) – and against the backdrop of NIS2, many companies will need to protect themselves even better to improve resilience of critical systems and processes. Customers are also raising the bar: The majority (87%) of consumers say they will not do business with a company if they have concerns about the business’s security practices.
[3]
In particular, organisations need to consider advanced cybersecurity measures such as multi-factor authentication, encryption, and secure cloud storage solutions to ensure security. This is where the professional support of a
professional security partner such as Konica Minolta makes a big difference with services such as identity, data and endpoint protection,
managed backup management services and
remote monitoring and management.
Trend 3: Employee well-being and engagement
Employees are the most valuable resource of an organisation and a positive and productive relationship needs to be nurtured and grown. Employee well-being and engagement is critical, especially in an increasingly competitive talent market, which will be further exacerbated by the evolving workplace expectations of Generation Z workers (49% choose their work/employer based on personal values
[4]), the aging population (between 2015 and 2050, the global population over 60 years will nearly double from 12% to 22%
[5]) and skills shortage
[6], which all put increasing pressure on existing employees as well. Flexible work arrangements, mental health support, providing a suitable digital employee experience, and resources for greater work-life balance are all crucial as parts of a ‘duty of care’ to employees.
Konica Minolta for instance has
the Flourish programme, which supports all aspects of the working experience including personal development and growth, health and well-being, and the celebration of talent and achievement. Konica Minolta also promotes diversity, equity and the inclusion of all employees with for example the execution of programmes such as Woman2Lead and ShePlus, the development of ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) such as the
LGBTQ+ network VIBRANT or the increase of awareness for disability inclusion. Moreover, the company enables a
flexible approach to working in the office, from home, or a hybrid option, for a better work-life balance.
Trend 4: Further cloud-based collaboration
Hybrid and remote working are powered by cloud-based communication and collaboration systems, so the further adoption and refinement of these will ensure the workforce continues to work smoothly and productively together. The collaboration software market has an annual growth rate of 2%)
[7]. The highest growth segment for collaboration tools is teamwork apps for mobile devices which enable workers to work successfully together whatever their location
[8].
As a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Partner, Konica Minolta’s accredited expert team is able to assist any size and type of organisation to realise the full communication and collaboration benefits from the Microsoft range of tools. This includes
Microsoft 365 including Microsoft Teams, which helps businesses to better organise and interact with employees.
Trend 5: Sustainability and ensuring technology and workplace practices can better support it
In view of climate change, the sustainability aspect will continue to play an increasingly important role when considering the digital workplace in 2024. Essentially, the question is to what extent the digital transformation with its technologies and changing workplace practices can act as a driver for greater sustainability in the workplace. Perhaps one of the most tangible examples of digitalisation minimising resource consumption while delivering significant benefits to business performance is the reduction of paper use in business processes, especially when you consider that on average 50% of a company's waste is paper.
[9] Cloud and collaboration tools enable remote collaboration, reducing the need to commute to the office or travel by air for meetings. Cloud-based solutions in particular can also be more sustainable than on-premise solutions, provided certain factors (power consumption, water consumption, lifespan of devices, digital cleanup) are taken into account. For example, cloud servers that are operated with 100% renewable electricity only consume half the CO2e per year/server compared to on-premise servers with renewable electricity. On-premise servers without renewable electricity consume even six times as much.
[10]
With its
Intelligent Connected Workplace approach, which focuses on digital collaboration and intelligent, paperless processes, Konica Minolta is endeavouring to take the sustainability aspect into greater consideration. In addition to
Microsoft 365 collaboration solutions, the company also offers
hosting of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in its own data centres, which are ISO14001 certified and run on 100% renewable energy. For necessary service calls, Konica Minolta relies on the visual remote service tool
AIRe Link, which has already saved 23,567 on-site visits, 911,295 kilometres and 330 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions have been saved since 2020
[11].
