Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Chris O'Neal, Evangelist at Workfront

The Future of Work

The End of Email

According to the Workfront 2018 State of Work Report, email and wasteful meetings cripple productivity.  U.S. workers say they spend only 40% of their workday on primary tasks.  All of that will change in the next 5 years as organizations implement digital tools to manage modern work. A few of the key ways that will shift:

• Better alignment of work to strategy, ensuring that people are working on the right things that have been prioritized by the business
• More visibility into how various contributors' work comes together to understand how deadlines and output work together
• More focus on results--how the time spent working actually impacts the business
• Better work planning and requirements gathering--if focus is put into gathering what people need to accomplish when they are planning / requesting work, there will be less need for meetings/ emails / ad hoc work
  

BYODx  = Bring Your Own Digital Experience

The digitization of organizations will become a commonplace occurrence (happening over and over in iterations), and we will move into the Digital Transformation of the individual. Each of us will become radically digitized (at home, at work, everywhere) via hyper-personalized digital environments that are built to serve us and follow us everywhere we go. These personal digital environments will be built to plug into other digital environments seamlessly, such as in a work environment, creating workflows, collaboration paths, and amplifying individual effort.

Back to Basics

Massive automation will finally set free the most important asset we have: the human heart. This will allow society to engage in critical thinking at scale, to solve our biggest problems, and unleash the compassion of our collective humanity. Because automation has shouldered formerly burdensome and distracting tasks, humans will be set free to reach out in uniquely human ways. Automation will free us, finally making it possible to give us back to ourselves, and to each other.

Trust will Increase

According to the Workfront 2018 State of Work Report, today's workers would give their coworkers 3.7 stars if they were Uber drivers. With more visibility into work in the future, that number will go up, as there is more understanding of what people are doing and why they are doing it. There will also be better understanding of productivity levels in the workplace as teams can see how their work ties into the bigger company/department/team strategy.

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About the Author

As an Evangelist at Workfront, a SaaS company at the forefront of modern work management, Chris O'Neal helps shape and share Workfront's vision for automating knowledge work and collaboration across the modern enterprise.