A recent study by Sony Professional Solutions (SPS) found that as hybrid workplaces become the new normal, where employees come to the office occasionally and complete the rest of the task by working from home, employers need to plan their workplaces better. The evidence from the study suggests that remote workplaces have a long way to go to be optimized for health, productivity, efficiency, and the ability to monitor employee work to improve collaboration. Also, as Covid-19 restrictions have limited social interactions between workers, production and innovation will heavily depend on collaborative technologies.
Collaborative technologies designed to support the new, hybrid workplaces!
Better meetings with enhanced clarity
Today’s collaboration tools are centered around facilitating people-focused features such as speech enhancement and noise cancellation, which automatically detects and suppresses common noises so meeting attendees can focus more on meetings. With today’s collaborative technology, localized, real-time transcription of an active speaker is possible in different languages that enable smarter and more productive meetings.
Better sense of community
Soon, collaboration suites will be able to offer immersive sharing to enable users to share videos, presentations, or applications as a dynamic background with video overlaid. Advanced features like in-meeting gesture recognition using AI will also be a reality soon, which will enable the translation of very localized signals into something recognizable by all those partaking in the meeting, irrespective of their cultural origin. This will enable workers around the world to feel a sense of community.
Artificial Intelligence to bring more innovation to collaboration platforms
Artificial Intelligence, which is touted as the future of work, is expected to bring further innovation for unified communications (UC) and collaboration platforms to support remote work. AI development would take meeting transcriptions to the next level by intelligently detecting which parts of a meeting are the most significant to a specific employee and sending meeting minutes based on that information.
Besides that, data mining, which is an AI capability, can help businesses understand how employees network with each other and how they can run their businesses more effectively.
[Also Read: AI & the future of work]
VR boardrooms for better collaboration
Companies such as RealSense offer Virtual Reality products that allow live streamers to change their background to content, which enhances presentations for everyone. Several other companies are working on creating personal avatars using body language, which allows users to interact in a way that will bring them to life in virtual reality.
Chatbots and smart virtual assistants
Many companies are discovering uses of chatbots and smart virtual personal assistants (SVPA) in offices for better collaboration. With their ability to do tasks, such as meeting scheduling, task reminders, and note-taking, they will be perfect for boosting productivity and improving collaboration. Smart virtual personal assistants will be capable of scanning emails for important information and presenting a daily meeting schedule, thus improving employees’ efficiency and productivity.
As the pandemic spread its presence globally, collaborative technology proved to be the key enabler, and its use soared. Today, several new and innovative technologies for collaborative working are emerging, which will not only change workplaces forever but will also give a competitive edge to those who use them. Therefore, businesses must explore these technologies and make the most of the opportunities they present for businesses and their workers.
