Technology in the workplace: 4 innovations you should know about

Once you enter the workplace, you’ll notice that it’s a fast-changing beast that can often introduce innovation when you least expect it, leaving you with no instructions to adapt and evolve. Employers always rush to be the forerunners of any innovation, including the kind that speeds up their business processes and helps them streamline their operations. That benefits you as the employee, but it also poses a challenge for you to keep an eye on the latest trends so as to be able to adapt in time and make the most of the perks these changes bring.

Luckily, it’s sometimes more than enough to do some research and get to know the innovations that drive business success. They can also help you determine which employers are the most appealing to you and can give you the best career path, precisely thanks to their forward-thinking prowess. Here are a few tech trends that have the power to improve your bond with your employer and to help you choose your next career move based on any business’s ability to adapt and evolve.

Streamlined workflows with PM tools

The backbone of any business is collaboration. When you become a part of a team, you want to be able to share information, get answers quickly, and record any contribution you’ve made to any project you’re working on. That is by far the simplest way to understand when you’re overwhelmed with tasks while someone else on your team is being pushed aside, and to always have a simple way to organize your workday.

Using project management (PM) tools the likes of Trello or Asana is a trend on the rise among businesses big and small alike. Their numerous features make them perfectly adjustable for brands across different industries, so they’re no longer limited to your typical marketing agency working with remote writers. However, it’s important that you, as the employee, know how to navigate these programs. As intuitive as they may be, try to get to know their features beforehand, so that you can focus on the actual work when it’s time to join the team.

Personalized and automated payroll perks

The workplace has changed to a great extent since the traditional nine-to-five idea has emerged. We now collaborate with employees from all over the globe, set in different time zones, and we use AI to fuel our business processes. When it comes to payment practices, employees should look for employees who offer perks such as a personalized payroll card that simplifies the entire process of receiving and collecting payments without any extraneous fees or long waiting times.

Such perks can ensure that your employer has your own wellbeing in mind when creating benefits programs to attract new talent to their team. Knowing how tech enables these simple but powerful changes gives you the advantage of asking the right questions in the interview and beyond. Your salary is a relevant point during your negotiations, so it makes sense that you want a seamless, secure process in place.

Green initiatives all around

Technology has allowed us to improve our productivity, but also our carbon footprint at work. For mindful employees who look for brands that align with their values, you can always ask about their in-house efforts and initiatives that let them aspire towards greater energy efficiency. Luckily, sometimes the simplest of changes can make quite a staggering difference in this realm, so most modern employers are now looking into various strategies to implement better, planet-friendlier practices across all of their departments.

For example, switching to solar panels and solar chargers is one way to use clean energy, while reducing paper use by going digital in most, if not all of their processes is now possible thanks to entire software solutions that automate digital invoicing, contract signing, and data exchange. Add to that business-wide efforts to empower remote working by providing you with your own laptop and any other essentials, and you know that their aim to reduce energy wasting and their carbon footprint is serious.

Identification made easy

Working in a large corporation that counts dozens, if not hundreds of employees can be rather overwhelming. Manual punching in to make sure that everyone is accounted for is outdated, but there are digital, tech-empowered solutions that help businesses understand where their employees are, especially if there’s an emergency situation or an evacuation. On-site hardware for identification and visitor management is a simple way to increase the safety and efficacy of any business.

When you’re in search for a position in a company that has such features, you know you’re in good hands. There are brands that now use even the more advanced varieties of biometric signing in, from facial recognition software, to fingerprinting. Of course, these are all different ways of speeding up an otherwise tedious process, and making sure that every employee is accounted for in case of an emergency evacuation.

Any business that invests in the safety, efficiency, and productivity of their employees is a business worth working with. Keep an eye on upcoming tech trends that will disrupt and change the workplace as we know it, and you’ll be better equipped to ask the right questions in interviews, and expect different perks from your employers.

Featured image courtesy of Pixabay