Earth-shattering innovations are the stuff of daily news these days. The technological advances that once promised to streamline day-to-day work activities have become integral to jobs across levels, functions, and industries.
Real-time messaging, video conferencing, and collaboration tools have opened the door to remote workforces. Unless the internet goes down, millions of people can work off-site without a hitch.
Strong evidence clearly illustrates that social media is creeping into our work lives, and I don’t mean surreptitious tweets at the office. There are a number of articles articulating the pros and cons of social media in the workplace.
Nowadays, businesses mostly use social media for customer intelligence, brand awareness, and retargeting customers. Social Media is transforming business cultures across the globe. The question is how will it continue to evolve in a way that is uniquely tailored to daily workplace activities?
New Realities
To gain mass adoptions, Facebook designs user experiences that serve everyone from Millennials to AARP members. That’s not easy to do.
B2B applications have smartly started to adopt Social Media’s philosophy of simplification to capture workforce attention.
Dozens of new productivity tools are released monthly, many of which weave friendly social media elements into their applications. Why? With a full third of the population using Social Media, there’s ubiquitous familiarity with social features. For instance, Slack enables employees to react to messages with emojis. There’s nothing like a quick fist bump to let your colleagues know you’re on board.
Social and AI features have weaved their way into everyday work activities, bringing on incremental productivity advancements. Companies are taking notice and beginning to productize these opportunities. In 2016, Facebook crossed over from B2C to B2B. They launched Workplace to capitalize on the familiarity of their platform to help coworkers connect and collaborate during office hours. Their AI gives important posts more weight than less significant posts, which means that you’re more likely to see what you need to see.
Future Workforce Disruptors
Augmented and Virtual Realities are expected to be the next tidal wave to hit the workplace. When AR and VR blaze into business applications, workplace collaboration will take on a new meaning. It’s easy to envision phenomenal prototype tools, state-of-the-art VR conferencing, and collaborative digital dashboards for project management coming down the pipe.
The wave that many aren’t noticing, though, is just beginning to crest. The next-gen B2B solutions leveraging the organizing principles behind Social Media will make the workplace easier and faster.
This evolution won’t be limited to likes, shares, and comment parity features. Business applications will incorporate society’s favorite social behaviors with AI technology, speeding up day-to-day work activities.
Software Turning Point
Take for instance a smart combination of hashtags and Artificial Intelligence.
An entire generation instinctively posts and searches for photos, videos, and content by leveraging the intuitive intelligence of tags. Instagram and Twitter rely on their combined one billion monthly active users to use hashtags to do the bulk of their organizing for them.
Social platforms have reshaped consumers to think, act, and organize their personal digital space — especially Millennials. This digital-savvy market makes up one-in-three American workers. In 2015 they surpassed Generation X to become the largest share of the US workforce, according to Pew Research Center.
A New Way To Organize
As companies embrace, invest, and design software for the hashtag generation, workplace productivity will come out ahead. Routine work activities, like filing, searching, and sharing company documents will no longer be frustrating, inefficient, and time-consuming. With machine-learning and groups of individuals tuned to digital organization, we’re on the cusp of automatically connecting people with the content they need at the moment they need it.
