By Patricia Hume, CEO, Canvas GFX

The pandemic has forced businesses around the world to adapt the way they work and embrace the benefits of a hybrid or complete remote working model. According to the World Economic Forum, since the pandemic, 84% of employers plan to rapidly digitalise working processes, including the potential transition of 44% of the workforce to remote working.

Over the past decade we have seen a gradual shift towards hybrid working practices where more and more employees habitually split workdays between the office and home in order to maintain a better work/life balance. Developments in mobile technology and online communications apps started the initial wave of remote working and now other drivers such as globalisation, environmental pressure on office space and indeed, COVID-19  have rapidly accelerated the transition to hybrid and remote working models.

Some projections suggests as much as 70% of the workforce will remain working remotely five days per week by 2025. Although there are many benefits to working remotely for employees and businesses alike there are also challenges when it comes to collaboration.

Since the start of the pandemic businesses had to quickly adopt tools for remote working and online collaboration platforms have now become embedded into employees’ daily routines. Zoom alone has experienced a three-fold year-on-year increase in revenue, while other tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack have also become staple communication platforms for remotely dispersed workforces. Chat threads and GIFs have replaced water-cooler moments and kitchenette gossip.

However, for many businesses, the problem with working remotely is that the process is never truly seamless; employees are often working across numerous software applications and tools. This makes the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively as a team much more challenging.

The Remote Work Challenge

Even though people have gradually become accustomed to working remotely in recent years, the wholesale shift to working from home brought on by the pandemic still came as something of a shock to many. To give one example, at the end of 2020, 70% of computer design businesses said they had not experienced working remotely before. Communication was cited as the top challenge (43%) followed by delayed feedback and unsatisfactory tools. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, 85% of working adults want to continue to work remotely for at least some of the time and businesses are ready to support this with 1-in-4 saying they will introduce more homeworking going forward.

To help distributed workforces, businesses need to adopt the tools that break down the collaboration and communication barrier employees face when working from home. In most industries, projects need to be communicated with absolute clarity and signed off by the client before the next stage can begin. Video calls don’t allow for easy collaboration when working with a remote workforce, particularly in the manufacturing, engineering and technical design industry where hybrid and remote work models pose an even bigger challenge. Employees need access to platforms which allows everyone – including non-technical users – to quickly create and share interactive visual documents across a variety of formats including real 3D CAD models. Visual communication is at the heart of these industries; errors in designs or dimensions, or changes in parts can cost a fortune to fix down the line.  Having access to the tools that allow on the spot-collaboration, interaction and feedback make for faster client approvals with less room for error, increasing overall business and team efficiency.

Given this new fragmented way of working, data, designs and documentation must also make sense for every single person within the organisation regardless of where they are working or their role within the company. Using collaborative software, employees can interact with one another, as well as the designs and documentation as if they’re in the same room, experiencing all of the benefits of being in an office environment.

As we’ve seen, remote working and collaboration comes with many challenges.  Cloud-based technology and creative collaboration tools will allow industries to get back on their feet and adapt to the shift towards hybrid and remote working. The right technology has the potential to help businesses achieve better communication processes, cut inefficiencies, minimise errors and drive sales.