Please join TMV and Cisco on Tuesday, Jan 26 at 1 PM ET, 10:AM PT, for a fireside chat with our General Partner and Co-Founder, Soraya Darabi. Soraya will discuss the emerging trends that are already beginning to shape and define a new era of remote work, among them enterprise efficiency, micro-social networking, and reskilling.
Register for the Future of Work webinar at futureofwork.webex.com
Enterprise Efficiency
In short, it’s tech that enables us to feel closer to our respective communities. At TMV, we maintain a strong thesis on the future of community-enabled tech—what it looks like, what it feels like, how it works. 20 years ago, it was unfathomable that we would communicate more on email than phone. Then instant messaging programs usurped traditional email, and so on. Today, we have over a dozen mediums on which to connect, from text to direct message. The average person has 8.6 social media accounts, up from 4.8 in 2014. And while 70% of the total US population has a presence on social media, only 27% actively use it in their jobs.
Micro-Social Networking
Whether community-enabled tech brings us closer to our professional or to our interpersonal communities, it’s bound to include new platforms and new ways to create networks and strong micro-communities with a shared purpose. What does this mean for the business world? At TMV, we predict that the financial industry will soon make a dramatic shift toward active engagement on a host of social networks, some niche, and sector-specific, others vast and accessible. At TMV, we recommend that all levels of staff become fluent in social media, with CEOs managing their own Twitter accounts, or at the least, approving them.
Reskilling: The Age of Digital Literacy
While digital fluency used to be considered a plus, today, it’s a must, not only for seamless operations but also for meaningful communication across all functions, from the smallest tasks to the largest. There are three types of reskilling that organizations can begin implementing now. I would start by encouraging organizations to teach all teams basic computer science and coding. While this might seem extreme, the goal is to better equip employees to communicate and collaborate with engineers, who are paving the way forward (not simply to turn every employee into an engineer.)
In addition, the most forward-looking businesses I have seen recently established digital advisory boards, bringing in outside experts including data scientists, futurists, growth marketers known as growth hackers, startup founders, and others to weigh in on the larger organization’s approach to embracing innovation. These advisory boards are extremely helpful in offering field notes and best practices with a thoughtful outsider’s lens. The future of work is here. As employees are gradually given empowering knowledge and training, we will see not only increased productivity and profitability but also a new level of dedication—especially for those organizations who recognize that success depends, as it always has, on the people.