Create what’s next

The future of collaboration and productivity

The future of work is already here.

After a year of global disruption in 2020, the conversation around the future of work has intensified. Even before the pandemic, employees, business leaders, and analysts were already thinking about how work needed to evolve, but the crisis brought the future cascading into the present. Virtually overnight, millions of companies and workers became part of a yearlong global experiment in remote working, pushing their collaboration and productivity tools to the test across living rooms and time zones and continents. While some organizations were able to launch new solutions or adapt existing ones to keep their people connected and productive, many struggled.

The organizations that struggled quickly discovered their tools weren’t complete, scalable, secure, or built for the cloud era. Meanwhile, across all industries and business types, employees reported spikes in burnout, feelings of disconnection, and frustration with finding the latest information or using unfamiliar tools to collaborate.3 2020 was the year of “You’re on mute,” and “Can you see my screen?”

With a majority of businesses headed toward a hybrid blend of in-person and at-home schedules,27 the world of work has been transformed, possibly forever. Workers, employers, and analysts are having a fresh and fast-moving conversation about how organizations can succeed within the evolving future of work. But at the center of that discussion are two familiar topics: productivity and collaboration. How will they evolve in an era of distributed teams and surging employee demand for flexibility? And how will businesses meet expectations to innovate quickly and deliver on rising

customer expectations while navigating the new future of work?

Although 2020 was a major inflection point, a closer look reveals that many of the technologies, trends, and cultural norms shaping the future of work have been around for some time. For years, forward-thinking organizations have been wrestling with how to maximize collaboration, productivity, and wellbeing among their employees, and they’ve been developing the tools to make it happen at scale. By that measure, the future of work has been here for some time; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed or easily visible.

This report identifies three areas of focus for organizations wanting to catch up with competitors that are already empowering the future of work:

➊ Making work-from-anywhere a reality with flexible solutions

➋ Giving people helpful tools to maximize their impact

➌ Enabling knowledge sharing and human connection

Armed with these three strategies, businesses can improve productivity and encourage innovation while better meeting the needs of their customers and their employees—now and in the years ahead. Let’s take a look at each focus area.