HP Innovation Journal Issue 13: Winter 2019 | Page 38

The Future of Work is not only a technology revolution, but also fundamentally a cultural and organizational transformation with employees at its heart. MOBILITY: FLEXIBLE WORKING ENVIRONMENTS While most enterprises have a traditional mobile work- force (for example, the field and sales force), the wave of digital technology adoption is creating a new type of mobile workers who are not bound to their office desks as they were in the past. According to IDC, 56.5% of the workforce in 2017 in Western Europe had flexible work- styles, an increase of 5.7 percentage points year on year. Of those, 22% are working from home. According to the 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey, 64% of organizations are offering flexible working environments (21% higher compared with a similar survey the year before), reflecting not only how rapidly technology is facilitating flexible working, but also how employers are trusting employees with the new workstyles. The benefits are multiple. The Deloitte survey shows flexible working is strongly linked to improved performance and employee retention. At least 80% of Millennials in highly flexible environments believe it has a positive impact on well-being, productivity, and work engagement. Flexibility is not for all companies, but it can play an important role in employees’ decision to take or leave a job. Mobility is undoubtedly taking center stage in the new working environment, as employees are transforming any available space into a workspace. In the WorkSpace of the future, employees adopt a device-agnostic approach and use spaces as they see fit. Regular PCs are still a valuable working tool, especially for complex and demanding tasks, but there’s a growing interest in mobile form factors, such as convertibles, tab- lets, and smartphones. 36 HP Innovation Journal Issue 13 BY 2020 35% of next-generation enterprise mobile apps will use voice as a primary interface mode. 25% of enterprise mobile applications will use onboard artificial intelligence/machine learning capabilities on smart devices for a variety of applications. SECURING THE WORKPLACE: “BY DESIGN AND BY DEFAULT” As new workstyles are more open, flexible, and collabo- rative, IT departments are tasked to support employees while protecting corporate assets and personal pri- vacy. This is most challenging given the dynamic threat landscape (hackers turning their attention to mobile employees), the regulatory framework, and wide use of Shadow IT by most employees. It is therefore no surprise that security and data privacy protection is the top IT investment for 57% of digital organizations at present. The new European General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) has transformed the adoption of workplace security, not just in Europe but globally as well. GDPR is relevant to any company in the world handling the person- ally identifiable information (PII) of people in the EU and has important implications for internal companies with data transfers outside the EU (data sovereignty). Further- more, it is also becoming a global standard and top of the agenda for many governments across the world (Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, etc.)