Modern Workplace is a better way of working. It increases agility, productivity, and flexibility through holistic technology solutions that evolve the workplace. With collaboration tools, multi-device mobility, automation, and increased security, a Modern Workplace enables employees to do their work anywhere with greater efficiency and information security.

What is a Modern Workplace?

Modern Workplace is a term used to define organizations that recognize digital collaboration, technology, and tools as the way of the future.

The benefits of workplace modernization are endless, from cost reduction and time savings to improved collaboration and employee and customer satisfaction. The Modern Workplace is not only the future of business, but the vehicle to drive it forward.

Benefits of a Modern Workplace

The concept of a modern workplace has revolutionized how small businesses operate and offers numerous benefits to their growth and success. Here are some notable modern workplace benefits for small businesses:

Cost Reduction

With workplace modernization solutions, you can reduce redundancy, omitting necessary hardware, software, and applications, ultimately creating a cohesive workplace that works seamlessly across technologies.

Increased Productivity & Efficiency

The modern workplace is all about capitalizing on efficiency. By reducing the time-consuming barriers of conducting business solely in a physical environment, you can shift business to a virtual space, communicating in-person when it matters most but streamlining communications better served via the internet.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

Leveraging data is crucial to making informed and supportive decisions that use learnings from the past, present, and future. With Modern Workplace, you can access analytics tools and data management systems to help businesses collect, analyze, and interpret data related to their operations, customer behaviour, and market trends. By harnessing the power of data, small businesses can gain valuable insights, optimize their strategies, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and profitability.

Enhanced Employee Satisfaction & Retention

Flexible work arrangements and remote work options improve employees’ work-life balance. With modern workplace solutions, you can offer your teams flexible schedules, remote work opportunities, and work-from-home policies that promote employee well-being and satisfaction. Small businesses can attract and retain top talent by prioritizing work-life balance, resulting in higher employee morale, engagement, and productivity.

Better Document Management

With Modern Workplace, your workspace is always at the touch of your fingertips; whether you are at the office on a workstation, in your home office, or on your phone on the other side of the country, you can easily access and control documents to make hybrid work a breeze.

Improved Communication & Collaboration

A foundational element of the managed Modern Workplace solution is Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is the apex of collaboration; with it, you are always connected to your department and staff, have access to documents, and can easily collaborate with your team members.

Why Should You Use Modern Workplace?

The not-so-modern workplace is plagued by multiple “sources of truth.” It is a complex ecosystem with scattered applications across servers and computers that operate across numerous networks, siloing departments, documents, and operating systems in the process.

In this workplace, reporting could easily be more precise due to various sources loosely connected through people working on an adjusted version of the same documents. End users need help finding a clear path to completing tasks and projects, tangled in an overload of content and files with varying levels of legitimacy.

So what makes the modern workplace different? This solution untangles and consolidates this ecosystem. A concrete example is the automation of tasks, where expenses and approvals can become a seamless process devoid of human error and wait times. Further, workplace modernization eliminates tedious and redundant tasks by developing automated processes, acting on single sources of truth, and ensuring efficiency and accuracy.

The final result is a modern workplace with a flexible digital environment that embraces continued collaboration, seamless communication, and transparency.

What Do Employees Prefer?

You might be asking yourself, does remote work reduce employee productivity? 90% of teleworkers report consistent or higher productivity rates working remotely than in-office work. Giving your employees the flexibility and freedom to work comfortably also empowers them to use their time and yours better.

According to a Forbes Study:

  • 74% of professionals expect remote work to become standard
  • 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full-time
  • 61% of employees prefer being fully remote

Examples of a Modern Workplace

Modern workplace examples are vast, and the benefits are not limited to hybrid work but also extend to the infrastructure of your offices, including the technology, such as the hardware and software used, and more. Let’s look at some critical modern workplace examples:

Flexible Working Arrangements

Flexible, hybrid working conditions are the obvious and most sought-after benefit of the managed Modern Workplace. With cloud computing technology, you take your workplace anywhere in a secure and safe environment.

Technology-Based Solutions

Modern Workplace is all about using technology to work smarter, not harder. Solutions range from building powerful data reports that help you make decisions to shifting to collaborative applications to improve communication. A critical modern workplace solution is the Microsoft Teams Phone. With Teams phones, you can cut out landlines and traditional phone numbers by connecting your phone lines to a VoIP system that uses the internet to connect you to your team and customers. With VoIP calling, you can make and receive phone calls from any mobile device, whether a phone, laptop, or tablet, all while coming from the same unified number.

Innovative Office Design

Office design plays a larger role in employee productivity and efficiency than you may think. With innovative solutions like Microsoft Teams Rooms, you can build your office infrastructure to best integrate physical and virtual workforces for a culture of productivity. With this modern workplace environment, it’s possible to optimize your hardware and software and pair it with ongoing support to ensure your hybrid business runs smoothly.

Process Automation

Onboarding new employees and managing payroll are ongoing tasks for all HR departments. Numerous time-consuming and repetitive tasks come with these functions, which can lead to human error and redundancies.

Automation can streamline these tasks and roles. HR automation tools handle everything from processing payroll to managing employee benefits, freeing up valuable time for employees to tackle tasks more relevant to the organization’s success.

For example, onboarding new employees may have required numerous forms to be filled out across different formats, causing inconsistencies across documents and a lack of clarity for the employee and employer. With process automation through integrated workflow, these tasks are synthesized and streamlined into a single process, removing the hassle and ensuring that information is recovered.

Automation doesn’t remove jobs, but frees up valuable knowledge works, redefining roles to add value to businesses through innovative thinking.

How to Modernize a Workplace

The most crucial aspect of modernizing your workplace is understanding that the transition to the Modern Workplace environment is an ongoing journey; these solutions are about finding what works for your business. To achieve workplace modernization, the process requires a deep dive into your current business environment, from there, building out what solutions will best support and propel your organization forward.

Establish Clear Goals & Objectives

To understand where you want to go, we must first discover where you are. SysGen’s Digital Advisory team interviews vital stakeholders at your organization to understand the major pain points that need to be addressed. By understanding how you use technology, we can create a roadmap to the future, adding solutions supporting your business and removing redundancy systems that bog down your productivity.

Identify Necessary Resources & Technologies

After we’ve gained a deeper understanding of how your business uses technology, the next step is to identify potential solutions to the issues you experience. We can help you build your virtual business environment from the ground up, or add additional resources to your existing infrastructure.

Implement Processes & Strategies

Implementation is not a one-step process. It’s an ongoing journey; applying new technology to our business requires more than just setting up tech. It includes helping you and your employees see the technology’s value and understand how to use it optimally. While this can be a challenge, the results yield greater benefits. Alongside this ongoing process is posted project support because the reality is, your business is constantly changing, and so is technology on pointing support, which is additional support that SysGen offers in the Modern Workplace.

In Summary

With collaboration tools, multi-device mobility, automation, and increased security, Modern Workplace enables employees to do their work anywhere with greater efficiency and information security.

Now more than ever, intelligence is vital, and data-centric information is becoming a critical driver in business decisions. Modern Workplace is a platform that supports your business to connect employee experience through collaboration across functional teams, automate manual processes with integrated workplaces, and do so with intelligent security, ensuring that your business’s data is always secure.

SysGen’s Modern Workplace offering is built on the Microsoft 365 platform.

SysGen provides clients with a customized, white-glove application implementation that ensures alignment with your business needs and goals. We collaborate closely with our clients to understand their business needs while providing the configuration that meets those needs for long-term sustainability and adoption within the organization. Connect with us today to start your modern workplace journey.

Curious to learn more about the modern workplace?

Headshot of Dason Wells

Dason Wells

Digital Advisory Group Business Manager

As Digital Advisory Group Business Manager, Dason has over 20 years of experience focusing his business lens on assessing opportunities to drive long-term shareholder value using digital technologies. Bringing consulting expertise from his time at Xerox and IBM, Dason is skilled in process analysis, customer experience, effective communication, and negotiation. Over his career, he has contributed to hundreds of projects that have yielded significantly improved cost structures, increased asset utilization, and enhanced customer value within multiple industries including post-secondary, retail, banking, energy and mining, and agriculture.