Are modern workplaces really modern? Insights from Hyland’s latest Content Services Pulse Study

The not-so-modern workplace

Today’s workplaces, especially when compared to even just a few years ago, have taken leaps forward in technology modernization. The pandemic forced us all to recalibrate, and organizations made massive investments in technology to support their disrupted and redistributed teams. That said, where progress wasn’t demanded, it wasn’t made.

For example, although AI dominates conversations about making work more efficient and is more available than ever, and automation has changed the way millions of employees do their work, just 30% of survey respondents are taking advantage of AI-enabled automation today.

This means time-consuming manual work and workarounds still prevail in many corners of an enterprise, leading to wasted time, inaccurately input data, hard-to-find information, and poor experiences for employees and — importantly — customers.

Impacts of lagging modernization

Enterprises have spent decades chipping away at manual processes and systems, but in many cases that created a sprawling, overlapping ecosystem of disparate technologies still unable to perform to the level of today’s modern content solutions.

“Deploying more point solutions and mimicking manual processes digitally will not produce better results,” Forrester wrote in the study.

Without controlling the growing volume of content chaos, organization can’t meaningfully corral information, improve content curation or boost productivity. This lack of modernization impacts the entire enterprise, from business goals to the experiences of customers and employees.

Efficiency left on the table

The promise of the paperless workplace has been told since the 1900s. Most people are aware of the long-heralded benefits, like:

• Time saved locating and retrieving physical files
• Simpler collaboration among team members
• Improved information security
• Savings on real estate, as well as printing and storing documents

While those hold true, in today’s workplace, modernization offers efficiencies that go to the next level. Eliminating content silos — something 42% of the Forrester survey respondents say house hidden information across their enterprise — can dramatically improve the speed and quality of work.

Additionally, the disparity across enterprises in what gets modernized and what doesn’t has ripple effects. Forrester found that while 60% of respondents described their employee file management process as “more automated than manual handoffs” or “entirely automated handoffs,” just 28% could say the same about contract management.

Security and privacy risks

Employees need access to the right information, so it needs to be up-to-date, contextual and accurate. But making critical content accessible must be balanced with the strictest security protocols.

“Redundant, obsolete or trivial data leads to cluttered search results and confusion,” Forrester noted in the study. “Any uncertainty over which content holds sensitive customer or employee data exposes an organization to financial and reputational damage, especially if personally identifiable or other confidential information is breached or inadvertently leaked.”

The idea of good data hygiene is immensely important in security and privacy compliance. Unfortunately, even keeping data accurate and properly organized is difficult with legacy systems — so much so, that 45% of decision-makers described their data hygiene as inadequate. Further, poor data hygiene leads to poor decision-making and outcomes for anyone depending on it.

Innovation opportunities grind to a halt

When employees are burdened with low-value, repetitive or manual activities, energy and time for innovation disappears. Instead of repeatable workflows or AI-powered document processing speeding work, employees are bogged down with minutiae that, with the right investments, could be done quickly, accurately, securely and automatically. For example, this insurance organization eliminated 20,000 hours in manual processes by implementing robotic process automation.

When it comes to deployment options, on-premise setups can hinder innovation when compared to cloud deployments. For example, an IT team managing the complexities of on-site infrastructure have little time to innovate. Cloud-first organizations, however, can dispatch their IT teams to work on business-focused priorities, rather than monitoring hardware or network safety and functionality.

Experiences don’t meet customer expectations

Manual processes make creating, sharing, using and managing content difficult when compared to a digitized system. The proof of that is in the data:

• 78% of respondents said improving customer experience was the primary objective driving their content management strategy
• 76% have realized or expect to realize improved customer experiences from augmenting content-centric tasks and processes through intelligent automation

Employee engagement suffers

Top-talent employees want to work with the best technology and in a place that values innovation. Repetitive, manual tasks don’t deliver, and it leaves an engagement gap that diminishes the employee’s experience. Gallup’s 10th employee engagement meta-analysis put the profitability benefit of engaged employees 23% higher for organizations in the top quartile of employee engagement, with impacts of:

• 81% lower absenteeism
• Up to 43% lower employee turnover (varying by industry and role)
• 41% higher quality (fewer defects)
• 10% higher customer loyalty

Content services: The pillar of modernization

Forrester’s extensive study provides insight not just on the current landscape of content management trends and opportunities, but it also shares recommendations for how best to keep up.