Advice to Futureproof the Workplace, Starfleet Edition

While the overall direction of your organization is determined by leadership, the future of work is in the hands of employees, your most essential asset for cultivating a successful, innovative organization. By better connecting employees to information and insights you can create a responsive workforce, better informed to take the next best action or provide helpful information to customers.

Think of it this way, your business is Starfleet, and your industry is the United Federation of Planets. While Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and Uhura are ensuring the success of the mission, your employees are on the front lines throughout the ship, working the transporter room, manning the medbay, and crafting the right diplomacy initiatives to stay on top.

More Time for Mission Critical

If the crew has to go out to the farthest known reaches of the galaxy to retrieve critical information and materials that enable them to do their job and keep the ship running, they’re wasting valuable time that could instead be spent defeating Khan (again) or the Borg. Similarly, if your employees are wasting time looking through multiple systems and sources to assemble the information they need to do their jobs, you’re slowing down innovation.

Additionally, by removing obstacles to finding information, you are empowering people to do their work and removing the conditions that produce negative feedback loops. For example, If they can’t find the report they need or the internal expert with the answer, you’re delaying the sense of accomplishment felt from a mission well done.

Slingshot Into the Next Galaxy: Learn From Your Data

At ACTIVATE 2019, people from all over the world will share their experiences and best practices building engaging applications for the digital workplace. For example, when a co-worker searches “oil and gas” they could be looking for a conversation they remember reading one time in Slack, or they need to know which employee handles that sales vertical, or a research report from an expensive analyst they had previously downloaded but need to find again. Each of these scenarios has its own challenges and idiosyncrasies.

At ACTIVATE we’ll discuss how (and why) you should leverage AI and create feedback loops that pull from disparate sources while tracking and understanding how employee use and behavior can be a reliable predictor of success and engagement.

Make Scotty’s Work Time Look More Like His Civilian Time

Today’s digital natives bring their expectations of how technology should work from their lives outside work and demand a more user-centered search and data experience. It’s not enough for an app to be the required app to get the job done, it has to be engaging and intuitive to use. Take a page from the online consumer experience; Google and Amazon are the new standard bearers for finding information fast, with recommendations that can predict what you need before you even know you need it. By mimicking those interactions in the workplace, you’re delighting employees and creating less barriers to productivity.

At Lucidworks we’re walking the talk and working on several in-house apps to support customers and the customer excellence team to execute and be as successful as possible in maintaining best practices and efficient productivity from all.

Share Your Digital Workplace Stories

Do you have a digital workplace innovation to share, or your own set of tips and tricks? The ACTIVATE call for speakers is open now and we’d like to hear from you. Submit your speaking proposal before the May 8th deadline (full details).

Looking for ways to build a more efficient digital workplace? Be sure to register for ACTIVATE 2019 (super early ticket discounts run until May 17th) .

Live long and prosper.