It wasn't so long ago when the phrase "office skills" mainly conjured up abilities such as how fast you can type, how well you can create and maintain a spreadsheet, or how effectively you manage your email inbox. These skills still matter greatly in today's digital workplace, but are far from the only arrows you need to have in your professional quiver, as Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky writes in a new report, The Future of Work on Digitally Proficient Teams:
"[A] very different set of skills is required in today’s digital workplace. Now, people need to work across time zones and language barriers. They need to be available almost any time, any place via mobile or wearable devices. They need to know how to create interactive content using social media and live-streaming videos.
Today’s top employees don’t just do their own jobs, they also embrace the role of company advocates and act as unofficial sales, marketing and customer support staff. Today’s employees even need to recognize that some colleagues are not even human, as artificial intelligence and personal digital assistants become part of our everyday workflow.
The Digital Workplace Forces A Change of Mindset About Work
The days when employees did their daily tasks with a computer and a phone are long over. Today you're likely using instant messaging services, reading and posting blogs, sharing files, exploring social networks and sharing files in the course of doing your job, as Lepofsky writes. Moreover, you might be switching between multiple computers and mobile devices while performing these tasks. This has created a conundrum that's more about a mindset for working, as Lepofsky notes:
So what’s the right tool for the job? One of the most common frameworks for answering that question has been to decide if a task is for communication or collaboration. But what’s the difference? The (loose) boundary between these two is commonly drawn by defining communication as being the simple push of information, whereas collaboration is people working together to accomplish a common goal. While that’s pretty easy to understand, the reality is that both these terms are becoming insufficient in defining the way modern employees work.
In the past, a company would broadcast announcements to employees but today the approach may be more social, allowing workers to offer feedback and have discussions. Similarly, collaboration among workers today can't simply be about brainstorming and planning, Lepofsky notes. There's an increasing need for collaboration tools that provide much more structure and accountability. On balance, today's digital workplace requires a new perspective, Lepofksy writes:
Organizations and people who are able to modernize their mindset from communication and collaboration to conversation and coordination (see Figure 1) will benefit from more connected employee and customer communities. The participants in the communities will then shift from simply sharing to more effectively getting work done.
Your Digital Co-Worker Is Coming
Digital assistants will become part of the digital workplace in the wake of consumer products such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Echo, and will have serious relevance to your job, Lepofsky writes.
Google Now and Microsoft Cortana help keep us informed about the weather, news, stocks and sports scores. They can perform Web searches, set alarms, and play our favorite music. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a similar digital assistant at work? It could dynamically prioritize the things you need to be working on, automate responses, notify you about important content, and recommend the people you should be connecting with.
These digital assistants, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will play a significant role in the future of work.
Lepofsky goes into much greater detail on the future digital workplace in his full report. An excerpt of it can be downloaded at this link on Constellation Research's website.
Disclosure
Chris Kanaracus is Managing Editor of Constellation Insights. Alan Lepofsky, author of the report The Future of Work on Digitally Proficient Teams, is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
