Digitalization
The future of the digital workspace has already begun

Flexibility in the working world, always-on, globalization – they are more than just buzzwords of the digital working world. In medium-sized companies the digital transformation is becoming a growing challenge. Although many company managements want to use new technologies in order to increase the effectiveness of business processes, there is often a lack of clear and beneficial strategies. The aim is to work together from anywhere in the world and in real-time with the help of cloud technologies – based on the idea that freedom and flexibility create creativity.

Of course, these requirements and aims greatly impact the business culture; new forms of self-organization and mutual trust form the basis. In addition, the next generation of workers increasingly consists of employees for whom it is completely normal to exchange information via social media and deal with digital media. For this reason alone, the working world should meet the needs of employees – it is nearly impossible to convince a digital native to work at a local PC and exchange data with physical data carriers or within a local office network.

Requirements for digital workspaces

Due to modern technical possibilities, employees would like to be more flexible in the execution of their work. Therefore, it is important to be independent from time and place.

Digital workspace and home office

For a long time, there has been a growing desire for home office possibilities in order to save unnecessary trips to a fixed workplace.

Here, IT concepts for modernizing the IT infrastructure are already being put into practice. Digital workstation solutions are being implemented to ensure that all application programs and data can be made available to the digital worker anytime and anywhere.

Data security and digitalization

Apart from flexibility and efficiency enhancement, data security is another important reason for switching to a mobile and digital workspace. Business-critical data is no longer stored locally with the end user, but in a securely encrypted location in the cloud. The employees of a company should be able to synchronize data with their company from anywhere using cloud technologies in a simple way (keyword: usability), securely and without data protection risk.

The digital workspace of the future

It is not enough to equip co-workers of a company with mobile devices such as notebooks, tablet PCs or smartphones. Here too, the mobile workspace needs to meet the requirements of the employees and company management. The digital workplace should not only be created employee-specifically, but the colleague should also be able to choose his or her workplace, while always being able to use the same virtual work environment. In practice, this means that the company should not only offer space for retreat, but also space for creativity. Home Office, co-working-spaces and the freedom to choose the workplace (e.g. at home, in a café or at the customer).

Enterprises need to recognize this change in the digital world and realize that a digital and location-independent workplace plays an increasingly important role in the world of work. Young start-ups are already demonstrating how it works and are able to successfully bind employees to their company – not least because the “virtual office” has a homely feel to it. Recently an expert consultant for digital workspaces expressed this very appropriately: “The workspace becomes a home and the home becomes a workspace.”

As mentioned above, however, retreat possibilities are also very important, so that the advantages of the digital workplace do not become a curse of being "available at all times" for the employee.