It’s the paradox of the modern workplace: Everything has changed, but somehow everything’s still the same. We have dozens of new tools for sharing our work and communicating instantly with our colleagues. We’re editing a Google Doc together and then jumping into a Slack channel to discuss a hot topic (all while responding to a text from a customer). We’re uploading files to Dropbox and texting our bosses that we’ll be working on that big presentation over the weekend. Increasingly, all of our information is in the cloud.
And yet it appears we have not grown significantly more productive. In fact, some scholars argue that the rapid rise in productivity that fueled the American economy for decades has petered out -- for good. In economics, productivity basically means how much money is made per hour worked. So according to this formula, the emergence of electricity and the automobile accelerated our economy significantly, allowing us to make more money in the same amount of time, but the computer hasn’t. The digitization of the modern office, however, has only given us incremental gains. It may have changed our personal lives and made it impossible to forget the embarrassing things we did in high school, but has it fundamentally changed the way we work?
Nevertheless, digital disruption is starkly real. I’d go so far as to say that the term "digital disruption" has already become a cliché. The rise of the digital world has left some companies in the dust and created billions of dollars’ worth of new shareholder value. We just accept that massive technological change is the new norm.
So why hasn’t it more significantly increased the effectiveness of our day-to-day working lives and economic indicators like gross domestic product (GDP)?
There’s little doubt that the internet and the immediacy of email and texting represent major changes for business. But I’ve spoken to clients who are still struggling just to get around the file-size limitations in their corporate email accounts. If you can’t email a video file to a colleague who sits right next to you, how much has the cloud really changed the way you work?
This is where the virtual workplace comes into the picture. The virtualization of applications like word processing and spreadsheets has started to change the modern office. Say you’re trying to get a brochure about a new product approved and you need five people to sign off on it. If you and your colleagues still email Word files back and forth to one another, this could take weeks. Factor in a week just for that file to vanish into the black hole that is your boss’s desk. But if your office uses Google Docs, everyone can work at the same time. Fewer holdups mean the process moves faster. Everyone always has the most current version by design.
But these productivity gains, as the data on productivity shows, are incremental. We work a little faster, we get that brochure approved a few days sooner. We haven’t unlocked true massive changes in productivity -- yet.
The rise in productivity promised by new technology will come once we virtualize the workplace. This is the next frontier. Moving the brainstorming, ideation and design phases of work into a virtual space makes real, significant changes in the way we work. One of our clients works on 5,000 design projects every year. Moving those projects into a virtual workspace has shortened the design process from nine weeks to four. Cutting the time it takes to complete every single one of those 5,000 projects in half -- that’s an example of how those promised massive productivity gains will emerge.
There is a whole host of companies, from big players to specialty players and startups, helping to define and grow this space. Among them are Google with G Suite’s Jamboard and Microsoft with Surface Hub. There are also meetings-focused collaboration tools like Oblong and more specialized offerings such as Autodesk 360, Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft’s Minecraft for Education.
Beyond just improving our productivity, virtualizing this kind of open-ended creative work will spark major changes in the way we work and how we discover problems and come up with solutions. Virtual collaboration has the potential to not only help us work faster, but more strategically, democratically and transparently. When we all work in a single, always-accessible virtual space, good ideas can quickly rise to the top, no matter where they come from. A customer experience manager who sees the issues customers are running into can have just as much opportunity to influence the outcome of a project as a product designer or senior VP. A virtual workspace also makes the process of coming up with new solutions far more transparent. Anyone, from any department -- even a client or customer -- can see how a project is progressing. And that means everyone can ask better questions and come up with more innovative answers.
Moving our offices to the cloud may not have fundamentally reshaped the way we work just yet. But that change is coming, and for some companies, it’s already here. The technology is available that will take that change from functional work to conceptual work, from the end product to the beginning of the process. When that happens, the way we work really will change forever.
