Breaking through to 2022: workplace predictions for the year ahead

Cast your mind back to December 2020… we were approaching a year of COVID-19, Donald Trump was still in office, and we made the prediction that 2021 was going to be the year of digital employee experience (DEX). Fast forward to 2021, where we assessed IT’s readiness when it comes to flexible working and – true to predictions – DEX was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, from Gartner, to Forrester and beyond.
And now, as we begin 2022, we’re looking forward to all the things the new year brings: a controversial World Cup in Qatar, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and – inevitably – more hybrid working. So, what does this mean for the workplace? Well, 1E CEO Mark Banfield is here to share his top predictions for the year ahead:

1. Continued acceleration and adjustment to the realities of hybrid work

The pandemic brought with it an almost overnight shift in the way people work, forcing many of us to embrace remote and hybrid work at an almost global scale. Many organizations were forced to adapt FAST to cope, implementing emergency solutions to the newly dispersed workforce.
However, these valiant efforts and (initially temporary) solutions aren’t sophisticated enough to deal with the hybrid workplace as it cements itself as the ‘new normal’. As Salesforce so aptly puts it, just as the term “cordless phone” has become obsolete as technology has progressed to the point where almost every phone is cordless, today’s “hybrid workplace” will soon just be called “the workplace”.
As such, 2022 will bring an even bigger demand on organizations to support hybrid working at scale and to continue the accelerated move to a digital-first workplace. And with only 34% of IT decision makers believing their current capabilities are up to the hybrid working challenge, there couldn’t be a better time to focus energy on this
What does this mean for you? It’s important to reassess the technology required to create a sustainable remote working experience WHILST upholding a great digital employee experience. A great place to start is by assessing your organizations DEX maturity and considering the implementation of a DEX Center of Excellence (CoE).

2. Heightened focus on proactive remediation

We’ve spoken previously about how the modern world of hybrid working requires organizations to move away from legacy IT approaches to become more proactive and employee-centric. And considering an estimated 40% of companies expect to be operating in a hybrid model by 2023, it’s safe to say that this need to eliminate digital friction and provide a seamless digital experience is going to remain a priority in the year ahead.
How can organizations work to meet the demands of a new employee-centric digital workplace? The answer lies in proactive remediation. Sure, monitoring and measuring experience is critical, but simply admiring the problem no longer cuts it. Enabling IT to proactively improve and fix issues quickly should be the highest priority. But proactive IT cannot happen without a service desk strategy that provides endpoint self-healing, experience-focused metrics, self-service provisioning and holistic root-cause analysis. You can learn more about the benefits of proactive IT here.

3. The ‘E’ word

‘Digital employee experience’ was the defining term for 2021, but what is going to be the focus this year? 2022 is looking to be the year of empathy – digital empathy to be specific.
Following the mass move to remote and hybrid working, there has been global realization of the importance of employee experience and sentiment, particularly when it comes to their digital experiences. Employees have traded in physical offices for a digital workplace, changing the expectations from IT. Hybrid employees expect personalised, flexible and seamless digital experiences, meaning that IT must be more empathetic to users.
Unconvinced? In the modern world of work, failure to deliver a good digital employee experience could have severe implications for your business bottom line. Begin preparing for the year of digital empathy by prioritizing sentiment data and cross-department analysis, optimizing internal processes and providing self-service or self-healing options.

Keen to learn more about what 2022 looks like for us here at 1E? Why not check out this recent vlog that explores our upcoming product roadmap and journey to even better DEX. Or if you’re more interested in 1E’s expansion and career plans? You can learn all you need to know in this exclusive panel interview with CEO, Mark Banfield; CRO, Richard Ward; and two of our Account Directors, Kash Fayyaz and Toby Stockley.