Smarter working for a changing world – technology that enables everyone

By John Ellis, August 12, 2022 - Future Workplace

Office life is changing, and technology is facilitating it. What were once traditional models of working have quickly become outdated or inconvenient – both for businesses and employees. Change in this space is now occurring regularly due to the greater uptake of flexible working and borderless offices, proliferating the rise of smarter working set ups.

In fact, borderless operations are now an employee expectation. But this can be difficult to offer to frontline workers; typically classed as those who interact directly with customers or other service providers. However, the sheer scale of ensuring seamless collaboration between frontline workers presents many challenges. Especially when considering that 74% of business leaders found it crucial for frontline workers to have the ability to work collaboratively with teammates, despite only 55% offering them access to communications and collaboration tools.

This highlights the need to utilize technology that helps workers operate in a smarter, more connected manner, helping drive value to a working environment, wherever it might be needed. Organizations therefore need to put employees at the center of their technological operations and digital platforms to meet to these expectations.

When this is in place, businesses can support more sustainable, long-term growth. But for this to happen, there needs to be a work life shift.

Partnering to facilitate the work life shift

Fujitsu’s work life shift lets organizations reimagine the employee experience. This is done by helping to create an adaptive, agile, and resilient culture. However, to facilitate a true workforce transformation, technology is just the first step.

There is a shift needed as it relates to workplace culture with people being placed at the heart of the new ways of working. This shift is supported by Fujitsu and Microsoft’s partnership who both have a strong belief in the power of technology to generate sustainable growth for businesses.

In this partnership, Microsoft provides the technology, and Fujitsu helps unlock its full potential in the real world. For the work life shift in particular, Fujitsu understands the ways that technology can benefit employees and customers to work smarter and ensure that frontline workers stay connected.

How to help people stay connected

Fujitsu and Microsoft work together to build customized transformations that allow customers to get more from their investments. This can be done by putting the Human-Centric Design Methodology (HXD) into practice.

Enacting this methodology helps people be more connected. Irrespective of whether they are in the field, the office, working from home or from a different country, the HXD promotes stronger connections. This gives people the tools they need to solve problems creatively and collaboratively. Giving them rapid access to the key insights they need to make informed, accurate decisions.

It’s about removing the barriers in people’s way. But to achieve this companies need robust, flexible operations and an infrastructure to match it, helping unify the experience for employees everywhere. With this in place, companies will no longer be required to prioritize either the employee or customer experience, they will have both simultaneously.

With the right technology from Fujitsu and Microsoft in place and a people-first approach ingrained; a more engaged, connected workforce will be created.

A culture change in action

When Fujitsu’s work life shift is facilitated by Microsoft technology, organizations can do more. By implementing technology in a human-centric way, companies can build workforces that are more inclusive and sustainable – enabling people to be more productive, more creative and to do more with innovative technology. Elements that were recently highlighted by work done with a European public sector customer from Finland, Scandinavia

Our customer recognized that smart technology had the potential to facilitate a shift to more efficient, agile ways of working. However, the technologies being used had to adhere to government policies, as well as continuously evolve as these policies were inevitably updated or altered, all while increasing efficiency within public services.

To help with this matter, our customer partnered with us to roll out work life shift with Microsoft applications. This allowed them to make use of its own knowledge regarding day-to-day challenges of employees and citizens, while accessing specialist knowledge from Fujitsu’s service implementation expertise of Microsoft’s smart technologies.

By using Microsoft applications effectively, it led to greater levels of efficiency. Technology was embedded into the wider cultural set up to encourage collaboration. Strong authentication of guest users was rolled out across the infrastructure to ensure employees could easily collaborate with those outside the business walls securely and effectively. Something as simple as unifying office document templates being installed in line with Fujitsu’s best practice was even able to elicit huge time saving benefits.

This greater efficiency meant that more time was able to be dedicated to strengthening sustainability and enacting innovations to facilitate a circular economy. This approach emphasized that the work life shift approach is not just good for workers and businesses, but for the planet as well.

The Workplace of Tomorrow

Fujitsu’s work life shift can help the workplace of tomorrow, which will be one that is more connected. It has the capacity to benefit employees in several ways including:

Borderless office – By securely connecting people everywhere, it frees them from both physical and time constraints. This means an office can operate without geographical limitations, providing the workplace flexibility that modern employees want.

Smart working – When empowered by AI that can handle the mundane and the repetitive, employees can find more innovative and creative ways to offer higher quality services and experiences. Smarter working means unshackling employees to find the most creative and effective solutions to problems, rather than outright replacing them with technology.

Desirable workplace culture– By placing people at the heart of the new ways of working, a more diverse, digitally literate and engaged workforce is cultivated. This will lead to improved operational effectiveness, as well as increased talent retention and attraction, therefore promoting growth.

By embracing the work life shift and evolving the traditional ways of operating, organizations can work with Fujitsu and Microsoft to build a workplace, and a workforce, designed to be smarter today, tomorrow, and further into the future.

Contact a Fujitsu expert today to start enabling your work life shift. Watch our video on this below.