CEOs are calling employees back into the office, but many employees don’t want to follow this call. It seems a crack is running through many organizations, an agonizing crack that may impact business operations. For leaders, this increasingly turns into a balancing act between driving work efficiency and ensuring a company’s appeal as an employer.1 If leaders feel inclined to mandate returns to the office, doesn’t this also imply that employees don’t see enough value in doing so?
It is undisputed that many tasks can be done well in a home office. But what about creative interaction, education, or coaching? What about the shared team experience of kicking off a project?
Working from home is convenient. It also helps with the coordination of private and business life. But let’s also not forget many office workers are also highly motivated to be productive and efficient. The recent Future of Enterprise #4.2 study conducted by the Ericsson IndustryLab research team has revealed that work efficiency is the primary driver for employees to embrace remote work.2 The study further investigates the existing challenges in many organizations when it comes to organizing work in the future.
Creative interaction, education, or coaching all have one thing in common: Interactive experience as a productivity factor. Therefore, this interactive experience may need to be the focal point for future office concepts. At the same time, the demand for more flexibility, the intention to reduce time spent commuting, and the need to engage a geographically distributed workforce will not go away. Particularly, younger generations of the workforce want flexibility and control over when, where, and how they work.3 All of this is driving a trend towards more decentralized office concepts involving “office hubs”, “flex spaces”, and “home offices”, as described in an earlier blog post by Henrik Eriksson and Heraldo Sales-Cavalcante.4
The challenge is therefore not only to ensure the best possible interactive working experience for employees but also to make it as seamless as possible across increasingly distributed work environments. Cyber-physical workplaces will therefore need to be part of evolving office concepts. This is putting the spotlight on human-centric use cases such as remote meetings, remote education, or digitally-enabled product development.
Emerging digital tools can accelerate interactive user experiences, but also bring new challenges
One interesting finding of the Future of Enterprise #4.2 study is that remote meetings and education applications are not yet perceived to be good enough for a full transition to virtual workplaces. More than one out of two employees are of this opinion.2 This may partly be due to software limitations or complex user interfaces, but there is also quite some room for improvement in remote document collaboration. The key aspect is probably that the interactive experience in digital collaboration is not yet where it should be.
Emerging digital tools such as AI or XR are now stepping up to improve things. Generative AI can automate administrative tasks, enhance communication flows and team collaboration, and deliver contextual content. AI-enabled simultaneous translations eliminate language barriers. XR technologies can generate a highly immersive experience and improved spatial awareness for remote collaboration with team members, which may even include tactical sensations, private and discreet communication (digital whispering), and other capabilities enabling natural human behavior.
Enterprise decision-makers do see the opportunity. About seven out of 10 decision-makers expect the utilization of Generative AI, AI-powered simultaneous translations, or fully immersive 3D meeting applications for digital collaboration within the next three to five years.2 This has the potential to enhance the digital collaboration experience significantly.
However, from an enterprise IS/IT manager’s perspective, this would entail managing larger number of devices and cellular subscriptions while ensuring the related cellular connectivity quality of service.
Seamless integrability is key to ensuring the applicability of cellular connectivity
It is easy to be carried away by visions of how the next generation of digital collaboration devices, tools, and technologies could revolutionize the user experience and accelerate business value creation. This may give us an impressive picture of their relevance. However, from the perspective of an enterprise IS/IT decision-maker, the integrability of devices, tools, and technology enablers into existing enterprise IT environments is crucial. If this is not possible in an efficient manner, such devices, tools, or technology enablers may not be suitable for an enterprise. The reason for this is the pressure to automate business processes to increase operational efficiency.
Telco APIs are key to integrating cellular networks, making them essential for human-centric use cases. These could include APIs for integrating communication services such as voice, video, or messaging into applications, or APIs that allow for specific network adjustment, such as setting a guaranteed bandwidth or latency for a specific use case.
Disrupting an existing market with communication service APIs
Let’s have a closer look at communication service APIs and how Túlka, a leader in Finnish interpreter services, managed to disrupt this market with the help of such APIs provided by Vonage, a part of Ericsson.
Imagine a common customer case for an interpretation service in the healthcare sector: A general practitioner is examining a foreign patient, a session that typically takes 10-15 minutes. Leveraging a traditional interpreter onsite would require booking the translator for 30 or 60 minutes. Additionally, there are travel and expense costs and administrative efforts in case something does not go as planned. But what if the doctor instead could instantly book a remote interpreter and pay for the translation service per minute? Things would become much easier, and cost savings could be in the range of 30-40 percent.
Based on a digital service delivery platform, this is exactly what Túlka is offering. The platform instantly matches available interpreters with users. Leveraging Vonage’s communication service APIs, a voice or video call is established, and usage data is provided to Túlka for per-minute-based service charging. A remote interpreter is always just a click away, and customers are only paying for the time they are using the service. Is it possible to achieve this through fully automated AI-powered translators? Yes, but not if liability is important, such as in healthcare or many governmental services.
Reflections and outlook
As with everything else, office concepts have also been subject to constant change. Past offices have been all about the employee as a “production resource” which an employer wanted to leverage at minimum cost but with maximum control. Just remember the cubicle. Future offices will need to respond to the workforce’s request for flexibility by providing a seamless, interactive work experience in a distributed work environment. We are now in a transition phase.5
Cyber-physical work environments will embrace offices, hubs, and home offices. Emerging digital tools such as AI and XR will ensure a seamless interactive experience. Cellular network APIs enable the automation and scalability of the underlying asset management quality of service processes. And CEOs may not need to call employees back to the office anymore. Employees will recognize the benefits of attending in person or leverage the flexibility of cyber-physical workplaces without compromising work efficiency.
Learn more
Read the full Ericsson IndustryLab’s “How enterprises create business value through digitalization – A future of enterprise study, Issue #4.2”
Learn more about the future of enterprise across sectors such as automotive, energy, manufacturing, and more.
Read more about our research insights in this blog posts "Why failing enterprise value creation might lead to rock music!" and “The role of 5G for turning products into services"