ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Archetype Report 2021

The individual quadrant reports are available at:

ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Human Workplace Re-imaginators - Archetype Report 2021

ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Workplace Transformers - Archetype Report 2021

ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Cost and Change Challengers - Archetype Report 2021

ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Business Model Adaptors - Archetype Report 2021

ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work - Services and Solutions - Experience Evangelists - Archetype Report 2021

Workplace may have seen accelerated change but industry patterns exist

The last 18 months has witnessed one of the largest workforce population movements. In a drive to keep businesses online and moving after the onset of COVID-19, herculean efforts were made which created nearly 800 million new home offices worldwide. This shift in ways of working was the hypersonic acceleration of the future workplace, which had been discussed and investigated for years prior to 2020, and was implemented in a matter of weeks. Organizations were categorized into digital categories depending on how they had planned and adapted to the future of work, as well as how their services and industries were consumed by the end customer in 2021.

This new shift has led to a near 1,000 percent increase in demand for videoconferencing and collaboration tools in many areas, with some improvements in the technology being used. The paradigm has shown that clients have historically overlooked resiliency, leading to a rush in shoring up corporate security and business continuity while trying to adapt to new delivery channels, support mechanisms and technology challenges. This has created both benefits and issues that clients should address as companies move into a more permanent new way of working in 2022. It has also created new paradoxes where previously perceived benefits such as work/life balance when working at home had been severely tested and, in many cases, where implemented poorly, has seen dramatic shifts in the wrong direction.

This move to new ways of working and servicing end customers has led to a new way of thinking about the future of work, which is broken down into three distinct workplaces, namely physical, digital and human workplaces. They have key components, but clients should consider them as interconnected in order to be successful.

ISG’s Future Workplace framework highlights the future of work components and challenges faced in the market. Providers are working rapidly to address them by offering more joint and holistic solutions.

Physical workplace:

• Provides a new normal COVID-19 secure environment for employees to work safely
• Enables a flexible and adaptable workspace to meet the needs of employees for collabo­ration or innovation
• Connected to corporate devices and networks, use of smart technology to enhance productivity
• Enable seamless physical and digital integration to ensure increased productivity, but at a reduced square meter cost resulting from a net reduction of spend on physical space, along with investments in the existing space to encompass better connectivity and technologies

Digital workplace:

• Converges devices to provide a fully unified communication and collaboration suite that can be accessed anywhere globally by employees
• Provides a cloud strategy that ensures applications and operations continue in timeof challenge
• Offers a service desk that provides a full augmentation and automation journey to assist human interaction
• Enables digital and physical converge to provide service anywhere at any time to anyone

Human workplace:

• Enables end-to-end operations by anyone and anywhere for internal and external customers
• Provides video/collaboration tooling for an improved customer experience
• Sees physical location becoming irrelevant through the use of digital and human/digital support
• Shifting from performance KPI/service-level agreements (SLAs) to experience-level agreement (XLA) based
• Allows employees to work where and when they want
• Makes customer experience at the heart of people strategy

Clients that planned ahead for a resilient model rather than just an efficient operation have been able to sustain themselves during the pandemic, The overall market is witnessing certain trends across industries as follows:

• Rapidly enable everyone to work from home for safety
• Provide collaboration technology to “keep the lights on”
• Expect to see an increase in employee productivity
• Have seen Zoom fatigue set in over time
• Started to see overworked employees reporting that the technology wasn’t helping as much as it was expected to
• Got reports that the social aspect of business is now missing, resulting in a proportion of employees wanting to come back to the office for part of their working week
• Plan on how to open buildings and manage employees in a secure way for those that do return
• Ensure that the digital and physical elements of return to work exist so that the hybrid workplace enables seamless collaboration regardless of distance
• Realize that the return to work impacts their physical, digital and human workplace strategies

Clients are making plans to adapt to these new workplaces to make them safe and collaborative workspaces. These workspaces also are being integrated into the digital remote workplace in which workers can seamlessly choose where they want to work but participate in processes or teams in the same way they would in person.

Forward-thinking clients are also taking into account the needs and wishes of employees. The majority of office workers have seen the light and now want to remain working at home for at least 50 percent of their time. For the digital workplace, however, it has become clear that many clients that successfully moved all their workers to a home office and onto mobile technology seem to believe that the problems are solved, and are relying on employees and teams to solve their own issues. This is not the case, and indeed it is not the end of the transformation. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning, and employers need to look hard at the cultural and personal shifts that the pandemic has caused. There is much more work to be done.

For clients with people working from home, their way of working has forever been changed by COVID-19. As a result, clients have had to adapt how they enable, manage and support their employees using technology. Home-based employees are reporting that they are working up to 40 percent longer with no correlated increase in productivity, despite the rollout of new digital capabilities and ways of working which were intended to aid productivity. This in itself has created negative effects after the initial work-at-home honeymoon period abruptly ended. The reason for this is that the technology deployed is reported to be unsatisfactory, not well supported or connected, and issues take longer to solve. People are becoming more stressed, and their personal time has taken a hit. Previously, when ad hoc at-home work happened, it seems it was easier to delineate work and personal time. Now, this line has been blurred.

The issues faced by the human workforce can result in a positive or negative productivity spiral that clients need to understand and be aware of. Management has conflicting and contrasting demands, which have resulted in some interesting practices impacting how enterprises deploy remote performance management, ensure staff feel part of the team and deploy new people-management cultures. On top of this, the technology of the pre-pandemic world has only advanced slightly, which has resulted in many people working harder to bridge the organizational shortfalls, provision technology tools, resolve IT problems and measure KPIs.

Employees want to work and be able to manage their time flexibly. They just want their lives and work to work for them. If anything, the pandemic has shown that the future we thought we were moving towards has caused employees and employers to realize there are new work models that enable a wholesale change of operations, customer experience and human interaction. This will be achieved through the seamless connection of physical space redesign with end-to-end digital operations that are managed and operated by smart human-digital cognitive technologies that can sense the needs of the customer, employee and operations.

To summarize, now that the pandemic has created a range of client types, there are unique challenges faced by each type, which brings challenges and opportunities for enterprise organizations. ISG has observed these trends and has identified five broad buckets, or archetypes, to categorize different buying behaviors. These archetypes are described in detail in the following sections. They also existed before the pandemic and will continue to persist for some time, as most enterprise organizations have overcome the initial shock of the crisis and are now strategizing for the foreseeable future. The five archetypes are explained in a following graphic and highlight the challenges and changes induced by COVID-19.

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