A plurality of workers now work remotely, and at the same time, productivity is booming within the professional industry sector. The Washington Post predicted in August that business was due a productivity boom, and that has now tipped over, and businesses are getting more out of their worker hours than ever before. This is a more complex story than it appears on the face of it. While worker psychological wellbeing has been crucial in attaining this level of focus, the real success story has been in the digital tools that have been innovated in order to meet the remote working demand.
The first challenge in making remote working effective was meeting employee demands. Effective remote working is about more than just putting a computer in the home of the employee. It demands a dedicated working area, no matter how compact and simple; remote work can be conducted effectively in small spaces, and, indeed, more focused work conducted in a tightly organized and focused space. It has also demanded bespoke digital tools. Remote working has both demanded this, and created this - a symbiotic relationship. According to Scientific American, the need to ‘think outside the box’ has created a much more innovative environment, and that has created fantastic digital tools that are enabling remote working - and enabling more productive post-pandemic workspaces.
The Harvard Business Review highlights the rise of temporary workers in response to short-term pandemic needs. This has helped to create digital tools, which can be used to help workers quickly switch into new projects and workstreams. In return, these workers bring a fresh pair of eyes to businesses. That helps to break through creative thinking barriers, and create new ways of working - once again promoting the need to think outside the box. That constant innovation is crucial to the business of digital innovation, and has led to a continuous upscaling in the tools that have revolutionized business over the past couple of years.
The rapid upscaling of the digital economy has led to much greater interest and investment in one of the most important technologies to grow over the past decade - AI. As Deloitte highlights, tapping the potential of AI has helped businesses to automate many features of their business, and to bring new levels of remote integration into their working policies and processes. Key among these innovations is cloud observability, according to Deloitte - which uses AI to automatically process cloud data. The cloud was already a huge part of business IT prior to the advent of mass remote working, and has become crucial ever since, and will form a core part of the innovation scene - both inside business enterprise systems, and in service delivery to customers.
Business has undergone radical change since 2020, and with remote working in place, it will continue to find significant ways to change and innovate. This is good news for customers, and good for innovative business owners - provided they’re happy to keep ahead of the pack.
