Office Technology Trends

February 24, 2022

New office technology trends develop each year, and businesses should pay close attention to them if they want to grow and gain more customers. Business technology trends can help offices maintain customer and employee satisfaction and safety. Some of the top technology trends this year focus on optimizing office space functions, protecting sensitive data and connecting with customers effectively. Technology impacts how people communicate and make decisions, and it shapes how customers interact with and feel about brands.

Technology changes rapidly, and businesses need to change to reach customers and increase productivity. Adapting to technological changes and taking advantage of new trends keeps organizations running efficiently.

What Is Office/Business Technology?

Office technology, also known as business technology, includes the software, computer systems and networks organizations use to communicate, process data and distribute data. Technology allows businesses to produce competitive advantages and manage their operations efficiently. Organizational business technology includes tools and devices businesses use to execute everyday tasks, including the following:

Payroll management
Client management
Order fulfillment
Sales record analysis
Communication
Cybersecurity

Why Does Office/Business Technology Matter?

Office and business technology matters because it helps businesses manage operations, adapt to a rapidly changing environment and continue growing. Technology changes the way people gather information, interact with businesses and make decisions. Businesses have to keep up with technology trends to connect with their target audience, maintain employee satisfaction and manage productivity. Office technology provides businesses with the following benefits:

Efficiency

Technology helps businesses work efficiently, manage cash flow and reserve resources. It allows businesses to save space, time and money. Online meetings reduce the need for people to meet in offices. This saves time because employees don’t have to travel or leave their workspace, and it saves money because they don’t have to use resources such as office space and electricity. Additionally, warehouse inventory technologies help business owners manage storage costs when they need to hold products.

Certain technologies can also manage other business functions such as payroll, benefits, training and IT functions. When businesses use technology to manage certain tasks, it grants them time to work on more important goals.

Improved Communication

Technology improves communication between team members and between employees and customers. Video conferencing, email and online collaboration programs like project management software allow employees to communicate and collaborate efficiently. Technology also improves communication between businesses and customers. With effective websites, businesses can answer customers’ questions after hours.

Various shipping options allow businesses to move products quickly and across large geographic areas, ensuring they meet customer needs. Online contact forms, email and video conferencing options let businesses communicate with clients and customers quickly and efficiently, creating a positive public image.

Security

Security threats such as phishing, malware, spam emails and other threats put businesses at risk for stolen information, monetary theft and harmful viruses. Technology can prevent these threats by protecting sensitive information such as passwords, financial data and confidential business decisions. It helps corporations keep their ideas, strategies and client base private so the competition can’t steal it. Anti-virus software, strong passwords and other protective measures can ensure businesses keep information secure.

Top Current Office/Business Trends in 2022

Technology rapidly changes and brings about new trends each year. Businesses can benefit from office technology trends if they use them to grow and move operations forward. Business technology trends in 2022 can improve a business’s productivity, customer communication, cybersecurity and marketing efforts. Some of the top current technology trends include the following:

Internet of Things (IoT) Technology

IoT technology includes devices with sensors that can monitor data. These devices detect certain environmental factors such as office temperature, electricity and other factors, and they process and transmit this data to servers via the internet. This technology uses data to control lights, let employees know when office space is available and notifies people of issues like water leaks and other repair needs. It can also optimize office space design by monitoring employee work habits.

IoT technology helps companies reduce energy consumption by optimizing lighting, cleaning, air conditioning, heating and other functions. It can turn lights off when employees leave a room and control temperature to maintain office comfort. It can monitor which office spaces employees use to optimize cleaning schedules.

IoT technology can also support employees’ wellbeing and health by facilitating effective cleaning and monitoring air and water quality. It can increase security by monitoring when doors and windows open or close.

Decision Intelligence

Decision intelligence is using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve or enhance organizational decision-making. It’s a practical approach using analytics and intelligence to inform, refine and learn from decisions. Businesses can use the decision intelligence approach to model each potential decision as a group of processes and support human decision-making.

It combines social science, applied data science and managerial science to help organizations streamline decision-making processes. The decision intelligence approach can potentially automate decision-making through simulations, AI and augmented analytics.

Cloud-Native Platforms

Cloud-native platform technologies allow businesses to respond to sudden digital changes by building elastic, agile and resilient application architectures. Cloud-native applications are built with services and technologies also built on the cloud. Cloud-native software can quickly adapt to changing demands, workload types and marketplace requirements. It evolves to work within modern online environments.

Cybersecurity Mesh

Cybersecurity mesh allows businesses to integrate security services for improved overall security. Cybersecurity mesh involves creating security perimeters around IT network nodes or devices. Rather than placing one large perimeter around all devices and nodes as a whole, cybersecurity mesh builds smaller perimeters to protect each component of an office’s system. This form of cybersecurity control is reliable, scalable and flexible, and it prevents hackers from damaging or exploiting different parts of a business’s network.

Cybersecurity mesh combines stand-alone security measures to work together and optimize overall security. It moves control points closer to the devices and systems they protect, and it can quickly verify policy adherence, context and identity over noncloud and cloud environments.

Privacy-Enhancing Computation

Privacy-enhancing computation technology uses strong encryption methods combined with other technologies to create private data sets and protect individuals’ sensitive information. It lets separate parties take value from data without exposing sensitive information or other datasets. Privacy-enhancing computation can include multi-party computations, zero-knowledge proofs, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption and trusted execution environments (TEE).

Multi-party computations let parties share computational operations without revealing which parties performed which functions. Zero-knowledge proof can help businesses share true information by revealing what is true without exposing any other aspects of it.

Differential privacy systems allow businesses to share dataset information while protecting individual member identities in each group. Homomorphic encryption helps encrypted information remain encrypted even when people perform computations. Trusted execution environments are secure main processor areas that protect inner data and code. These tools and techniques help businesses follow data protection laws and ease consumer concerns.

Safe and Flexible Workspace

Office space design should focus on employees to ensure a comfortable and safe work environment that supports productivity. Remote work became common following the pandemic, but many employees are returning to offices. Safe, comfortable and attractive workspaces can encourage workers to return to the office, and a satisfactory workspace can increase productivity.

Hybrid schedules allow employees to split workdays between remote work and working from the office. This increases employee satisfaction and saves office energy and resources when employees work remotely. Laptop loaner programs allow employees to borrow laptops when they need to use them at home or in the office. This benefits employees when they forget a laptop at home, misplace their laptop, experience technical issues or simply need to borrow a laptop for remote work.

Digital Twin Technology

A digital twin virtually represents systems, operations and objects to optimize decision-making. Digital twin technology uses real-time data updates, machine learning, simulation and reasoning to help businesses make important decisions. This eliminates the need to develop or produce complex products, helping companies save time and money. With digital twin technology, businesses can automate routine tasks, predict real-time changes and adapt to changes.

Optimized Hybrid Working

Technology allows employees the freedom and ability to work efficiently both in the office and remotely. The key to productive remote and hybrid work is self-service as well as effective connection. When employees can easily access necessary resources, materials, information and content, they can work productively from anywhere.

Video conferencing, email and other online communication tools allow employees to communicate while working remotely. Employees can access the materials they need from anywhere through brand and style guides, online schedules, executive announcements, HR documents and other resources.

Connected TV Marketing

Connected television (CTV) is any TV set that streams video via the internet. CTV can include connected devices, smart TVs and gaming consoles. CTV advertising lets businesses reach customers through advanced measurements and data-driven targeting. Many businesses are moving away from broadcast TV advertising and implementing CTV advertising to reach more consumers.

CTV advertising has various benefits, such as measurable results and increased targeting capabilities. Increased targeting capabilities allow marketers to target their most valuable audience, ensuring their advertising efforts and budget will encourage more conversions. Programmatic platforms help businesses measure campaign results through traditional and digital metrics.

Omnichannel Customer Support

Omnichannel customer support creates a holistic customer experience through integrated, multi-channel approaches. With omnichannel customer support, customers can interact with brands or shop from any device. Examples of omnichannel support include SMS texts sent to customers as they shop in-store, cart abandonment emails and retargeted ads.

Omnichannel support remains personalized and consistent across all devices and channels. It allows consumers to connect with businesses via websites, social media pages, email and other avenues seamlessly. Businesses can no longer rely on website chat options alone. Omnichannel customer support allows them to connect with customers on multiple platforms in an integrative way.

Consumer-Focused User Experience Technology

Technology advancements allow businesses to increase user experience and connect with customers in new ways. Virtual reality and augmented reality technologies transform how consumers gather information, make decisions and purchase products. Virtual reality can immerse consumers in virtual stores and let them browse, shop and receive assistance from home. With this technology, businesses can encourage consumers to try new products they wouldn’t normally.

Virtual reality and augmented reality technology also allow businesses to connect with customers on an emotional level. Marketers use this technology to create exhilarating, emotional and sometimes even scary campaigns to present products in ways that connect with consumers on a deeper level than traditional ad campaigns. This technology also allows consumers to experience or try products via virtual simulation before purchasing them.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain technology digitally records and stores information in ways that make it easy to share data quickly and securely while preventing people from hacking, changing or cheating systems. Data stored in blockchains is irreversible, meaning no one can alter or delete information or transactions once complete. Blockchain technology can allow businesses to eliminate ad fraud and optimize supply chains, individually control data and easily share data.

Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation is a business-driven approach organizations can use to quickly identify, examine and automate IT and business processes. It enables remote operation, business model disruption and scalability. Hyperautomation combines artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to automate complex processes.

Hyperautomation lets businesses create a digital workforce that manages repetitive tasks and free employees to increase productivity in other work areas. A digital workforce can operate with unstructured and structured data, analyze data, discover new processes, recognize new automation opportunities and make decisions.

Data Fabric

Data fabric integrates data sources across business users and platforms resiliently and flexibly. This makes data available everywhere users need it, no matter where it’s stored. Data fabric technology can use analytics to learn about data and recommend where it should be changed or used, reducing data management efforts and saving employees time.

Trust PowerGistics for Office Tech Solutions

Business technology trends are important because they help move businesses forward. This year’s top trends help companies optimize office functions, efficiency, employee productivity, cybersecurity and customer experience. PowerGistics provides offices with vertical charging stations for laptops, tablets and Chromebooks. Devices that are always charged and easily accessible can help your company keep up with technology trends and work efficiently.

With efficient charging stations, offices can implement laptop loaner programs to facilitate remote work and hybrid work schedules. If employees forget a device at home, misplace a device or experience technical issues, they can easily return to their work tasks and maintain productivity.

To optimize device storage in your office, ask about our USB charging stations. Remote and hybrid work options mean employees need reliable devices in the office and on the go. PowerGistics charging stations securely store devices with an open-concept design so employees can take and return them easily. They are designed to save space, and antimicrobial coating helps to keep office spaces clean and employees healthy during cold and flu seasons.

Contact PowerGistics to learn more about our USB charging stations and optimize device storage in your office.