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COVID-19 changed everything for businesses and workplaces. Collaboration between teams became a necessity as remote working quickly became a reality.

At Future of Work 2021, YS’s largest product-tech-design conference held on March 6-7, leaders from top technical and engineering firms came together on a panel to discuss the future of collaboration and what it means to the future of work.

“The working situation changed rapidly for everyone. Personally and professionally, many things changed our relationship to work. We realised remote work was possible. What is even more important was that enterprise sales seemed possible remotely. People were far more efficient with remote selling and remote collaboration. To make all this happen, our entire team met once every 15 days and leaders had to over-communicate that we were together in this journey,” said Pravanjan Choudhury, CTO of Capillary Technologies.

Dinesh Ajmera, the Head of Engineering and Site Lead at Atlassian Bengaluru, agreed that remote working picked up pace quickly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We launched Team Anywhere, which would allow teams to choose how they wanted to work and where they wanted to work. One could login from office, home, or anywhere. The future is hybrid when it comes to collaboration,” he said.

It’s clear that remote working is becoming the norm, and is not the exception. This has been accelerated by situations arising as a result of the pandemic and bolstered not only by the advent of new workplace technologies and collaboration software, but by a workforce increasingly made up of millennials and Gen Z, who expect to be able to work remotely and even make career decisions based on this.

Ankit Maheshwari, President – Engineering and India Operations, Innovaccer, said: “Take our example. We are an healthtech company and we quickly needed our teams in the USto be virtual. We had to run virtual design centres to ensure that they understood how they could connect with their patients seamlessly. Doctors had to be trained to understand virtual calls and sessions. We had to literally train them on the value of online collaboration. In the old days, we had to do virtual training; during the pandemic, we could train them remotely.”

This has seen the market for collaboration – and collaboration technology – mature rapidly.

Recent Deloitte analysis has found that since the start of lockdown, 75 percent of office workers have used at least two new types of technology for work.

“The pandemic gave us many areas of opportunity to learn and we reinvented ourselves. We helped ecommerce companies with warehouse automation. Some of our solutions helped corporates track whether people were wearing a mask or not and where they were congregating,” said Ajeya Moteganahalli, CTO, Honeywell SPS India.

A big shout-out to our Future of Work 2021 Co-presenting Sponsors Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Unique Solutions; Digital Excellence Partner Google Cloud; Associate Sponsors HP and Intel; and Sponsors Atlassian, Freight Tiger, Archon I Cohesity, TeamViewer, and Pocket Aces.