One of the more permanent consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the normalisation of hybrid work. Over the past couple of years employees and teams have gotten used to working from home – at least a few days a week if not more – and interacting with each other virtually.
Work from home has been a boon for firms with an international workforce, as disparate teams are able to work together across regions, countries, and even continents. However, for many firms remote work has also exposed a number of weaknesses.
From a lack of digitisation to subscribing to too many ill-suited team collaboration tools, many Malaysian firms are facing a flurry of new workplace problems stemming from poorly planned or insufficient digitisation. It is no surprise that, according to a recent survey, 49% of employees are frustrated by the tech and tools their organisation provides and 64% believe that the way they interact with technology negatively impacts morale.
On top of inadequate digital tools, many employees are required to spend precious work time performing repetitive administrative tasks. According to a study on workflow management, it is estimated that office workers are spending around 69 days per year on administration, which amounts to about US$5 trillion lost in productivity annually.
Malaysia is no stranger to inefficient work processes as many office workers will attest, and this affects everything from morale to company competitiveness. In fact, Malaysia was ranked 22nd in world competitiveness in 2018, but has since fallen to 25th in 2021 and 32nd in 2022.
Digital confusion leads to poor performance
Over the years a buzzword we often hear everywhere from the media to corporate boardrooms is ‘digitisation’. At its root, digitisation describes the act of using digital tools to store, organise and share information digitally, as well as remove or automate rules-based, manual tasks, leaving the user with more time to concentrate on creative, value-added work. Digitisation at its best is meant to make employees’ lives easier and more productive, while also encouraging better teamwork and collaboration.
However, many firms in Malaysia seem to have misunderstood this basic premise and mistook digitisation for simply subscribing to numerous workflow automation programs. Ask any Malaysian office worker and they will often describe having to log in to two, three, four or more programs to communicate and collaborate with their team members. Different departments will use different off-the-shelf specialised software which are unable to communicate with each other. This turns inter-departmental communication into a nightmare for even the most tech-savvy employee.
The problem is, every company has different needs, yet there are only a few affordable cloud-based workflow platforms on the market. These solutions may work for some organisations but won’t work for others. Furthermore, they are usually designed for a specific purpose, such as team communication, or for specific tasks such as software development. Organisations need to purchase multiple different tools to then cover all their bases.
On the other end of the scale, there are firms who do the bear minimum and make no real effort to digitise. These firms still rely on notoriously inefficient spreadsheets for tasks such as data and project management, yet still believe they have digitised.
Low/no code solutions and democratising workflow management
It wasn’t too long ago that, in order to have a website, we were required to hire a design firm at great cost, who would spend weeks designing and building a website from scratch. Today, millions of users rely on low / no code solutions to create and publish amazing websites quickly and at low cost.
We are seeing the same evolution with workflow management software. Rather than relying on off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions, low code solutions allow employees themselves to develop their own workflow management software. Importantly, because these solutions are developed from the ground up, by the employee for the employee, they are much better suited to the specific needs of each company, department and user.
No / low code solutions allow organisations to create their own customisable digital workplaces, enabling them to organise data, workflows, conversations and automations through custom apps housed in a centralised location for a more streamlined work experience.
Good low-code, developer friendly workflow platforms that are built and designed by employees themselves remove IT bottlenecks by providing no-code user friendly features that are suited not just to the company and industry, but down to the individual department and work centre. Non-tech-savvy employees can build and maintain their own workflow management assets, leading to faster, more accurate, and more cost-efficient results.
Importantly, as a company grows and evolves, its digital platform can be tweaked to better align with the team’s shifting requirements. We increasingly see diverse organisation use no-code/low-code across multiple offices in numerous countries, all working on the same platform that is customised down to the individual team.
Hybrid is here to stay
Hybrid work and the digital revolution that has enabled it is here to stay, and low-code / no-code technologies will be at the forefront. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organisations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in Malaysian business leaders need to understand that just because you have purchased an off the shelf workflow management tool doesn’t mean you’re done with your digital journey. True digitisation is complete when all the employees in your organisation are able to focus fully on productive, meaningful tasks and communicate with one another from wherever they are. No-code tools are the most efficient way to get there.
Article attributed: Yoshihisa Aono, CEO, Cybozu
Yoshihisa Aono co-founded the company in August 1997 after working for several years at Matsushita Denkou (currently Panasonic). In April 2005 he was appointed CEO and quickly began to spearhead the company’s workstyle reform. Then in 2011, he led Cybozu through its transition toward its flagship cloud-based product, Kintone. Aono is the author of several books on teamwork and happiness at work.
