3 Ways a Digital Assistant Supports Hybrid Work

There’s a lot of advice about how to effectively navigate the new world of hybrid work. Whether you’re looking to eliminate digital friction, support more flexible work, or simply avoid the most common mistakes, advice on hybrid work is as plentiful as pumpkin spiced lattes in the fall.

Some 52% of employees prefer hybrid work models (Source: Forbes)

There’s one suggestion that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, however, and that’s the use of a digital assistant.

While the term ‘digital assistant’ might immediately make you think of the ubiquitous robots we’ve all learned to shout commands and questions at, like Siri or Alexa, what I’m referring to is entirely different. In this case, a digital assistant is the growing category of enterprise technology that helps employees tackle the challenges inherent in the now mostly digital workplace.

A digital assistant can help employees better manage their attention, improve productivity, and feel more engaged.

There are many ways a digital assistant can help simplify the work day for your employees. Here are three of the most impactful:

1. Reduce digital friction

When organizations made the switch to remote work at the start of the pandemic, they did it in reactionary mode, digitizing processes as quickly as possible so they could keep their businesses running.

It was an approach that made perfect sense at the time but launching all those disparate apps had a downside. It led to a dramatic increase in digital friction, leaving employees struggling under the burden of having too many places to go for tasks and information (a phenomenon Gartner® refers to as “Yet Another Thing to Check,” or “YATTC”), and the friction of toggling back and forth between all the systems they need to do their jobs is causing stress.

YATTC is making it challenging for employees to effectively manage their attention (Source: Gartner)*

A digital assistant helps guide workers’ attention and reduce digital friction. It does so by abstracting just the tasks and information employees need and presenting it in a centralized location within the flow of work, whether that’s on the intranet, via mobile, or in platforms like Teams or Slack.

2. Enable flexibility

Starting with the emergence of mobile phones, it has become increasingly impossible to leave work at the office at the end of the day. And now it’s literally impossible since many of us don’t even have an office outside of our homes to demarcate that fine line between our business and personal lives.

The digital workplace is often the only workplace for the growing number of remote workers (Source: Intuition)

Employees need support managing this new era of work/life integration.

A digital assistant can help by providing employees with access to their important tasks and information wherever and whenever it's convenient for them. Productivity and effectiveness are greatly improved when workers can use a digital assistant to:

• Complete tasks and approvals from enterprise systems with just a click or two from a single, easy-to-use experience

• Receive proactive alerts about important information like office closures or staffing changes, as well as training and upskilling opportunities

• Get personalized answers to common questions whenever they need

3. Facilitate self-service tasks

Speed is critical in the world of modern business. Competition is fierce and companies need to run at optimum efficiency if they’re going to remain competitive. But working faster and more efficiently will require eliminating the bottlenecks that hold employees back. Organizations need to make it easier for employees to complete routine tasks and find information, so they have more time to focus on the high-value work that drives business success.

A digital assistant, armed with the power of an intelligent chatbot, can help them do just that.

A chatbot empowers employees to handle high-volume tasks like submitting self-service tickets, and provides instant, personalized answers to common questions. This enables employees to quickly complete the mundane aspects of their job and get back to the work they were hired to do.

A chatbot is a personalized conversational interface for answering questions and completing tasks. Put power in the hands of you employees with 24/7 access to critical information and self-service functionality.

To see how a digital assistant can help your organization, check out this brief demo video of Workgrid's digital assistant.

Want to learn more about how Workgrid can help create an intelligent workplace for your organization? Check out this 5-minute video demo.