What Does the Future of Work Look Like?

Since getting back to work, things have felt different. And it’s the small things – time, details and connections – that matter more than ever.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way businesses understand their day-to-day operations. There is now an urgency for businesses to become more flexible and agile. 

When we talk about getting back to the future of work, it’s not just about responding to COVID-19. It’s about how do we get people set up safely and use this disruption as potential energy to fuel a whole new level of agility in the future.

Low-code platforms can empower CIOs and IT leaders drive sustainable innovation and agility to the edge of the business as they address these new challenges. Here are three fundamental, dramatic changes that are here to stay.

Learning to Do More with Less

This is the change of our lifetime. We have experienced mass disruption and distress over the course of 2020. The reality is that companies may have to adjust to having fewer people. Yet, the pressure to perform at normal, pre-pandemic outputs is still there. IT budgets are being reviewed and cut, but compliance and complexity is only increasing, especially when it comes to keeping employees and customers safe as they get back to the future of work.

Technology must be able to meet the demands of this new reality, as it has in previous crises. In the 2001 Dot-Com crash, companies moved towards server consolidation. In 2008, there was a surge of investment in the public cloud, SaaS, and mobile. Companies were looking for how to connect with customers in a new way and shift expensive IT costs to in the cloud. Today, the path forward out of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession is unclear. Companies not only need to do more with less, they need to invest in how to keep their employees safe and keep their organizations moving through disruption.

Many companies turned to low-code platforms like Quick Base early on in the crisis to become more agile and meet the needs of their customers and community. For example, Tyrell Morris, Orleans Parish Communication District’s Executive Director, said his team was able to quickly create solutions to help track the number of people self-quarantining, provide residents with necessary resources, and help inform decision making, among other things.

Morris said it was critical to have the flexibility that low-code platforms provide to manage the early outbreak of COVID-19.  “Using our already existing infrastructure in Quick Base we quickly, in minutes, expanded that out to accept more of the COVID-19 related requests,” he said.

The Race to Digital Transformation

There is no longer ‘business as usual,’ but ‘business as unusual.’ There will come a time when COVID-19 will end. But disruptions will continue to present itself. You can’t be caught flat-footed. Your survival depends on rapidly adapting and implementing digital transformation efforts that may have been on the backburner.

If your digital transformation is going to be years, that is too long.

When COVID-19 hit, it felt as if everyone’s lives and jobs had changed seemingly overnight. Workforces, like Geisinger Health System, had to quickly become remote. Some employees needed to rapidly retrain their skills in order fill the critical gaps and safely treat patients.

Some Geisinger departments had started to adopt Quick Base to streamline their intake system when everything changed. Because it had already been used within the company as a strategic platform, it was much easier for them to rapidly develop an application that streamlined the reassignment process, minimizing the amount of time it would have taken to extract employee data from an enormous spreadsheet.

Geisinger’s Human Resources department has since used applications built with Quick Base’s low-code capabilities to reassign more than 2,000 employees.

But it doesn’t end there. The company’s HR Department recognized the need to speed up their digital transformation project in order to prepare for the future of work. While there will be a return to normal in some ways, the Geisinger team is aware that COVID-19 will drastically and permanently alter the health landscape in many other ways.

Prior to COVID-19 Geisinger had about 2,000 employees who were working remotely, and it was increased to 4,000 almost overnight. Now, they are able to continue tracking employees as the environment continues to change.

All Hands in the Pile

As companies balance trying to do more with less with addressing complex new challenges, they will need all hands in the pile to crank out effective solutions.

Hand coding or implementing high-code solutions are certainly important but the complexity, as well as the shortage of developers capable of doing this work, will not meet the demands of speed and adaptability.

Employees need to move quickly on digital projects and shouldn’t have to wait for IT. By empowering folks across departments to create and iterate on platforms with great UI, like low-code, all within the purview of IT, companies can improve on their processes and increase productivity.

Take St. George’s Hospital, a highly active medical center dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in Beirut, Lebanon. Since the start of the pandemic, the hospital’s Infectious Disease Research staff shifted their efforts to respond to this unexpected public health emergency.

Dealing with a fast spreading new virus meant that the unit needed a dynamic system to analyze data, track patient information and streamline staff communication. And there was no time to waste.

For the St. George’s Hospital Infectious Disease Research unit, tracing the contacts of patients who tested COVID-positive was urgent to halt the spread of the disease. Leveraging Quick Base allowed the team to develop the workflows to do just that – quickly.

Your company’s digital transformation efforts can’t wait. The future of work demands technology that can be adaptable, flexible and available to anyone in the organization.

The time is now.