The new digital workplaces: Lecko’s study is now available in English!

On the morning of 11 October in our offices, we presented the conclusions of our new state of the art. The sixty participants were thus able to discover what we think about the evolution of the mastodons of collaborative suites (Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite), the emergence of specialists (Workplace by Facebook), and the new challenges to be taken up to transform organizations. Yellow, a solution for collaborative and interactive meetings, presented (with a Samsung Flip touchscreen) how physical space is reinvented with digital.

The study can be downloaded (free of charge!) here: http://referentiel.lecko.fr/en/the-new-digital-workplaces/

Microsoft Office 365 vs. G Suite: game on!

Overview of the two vendors’ collaborative planets

The digital workplaces market is now dominated by Office 365 and G Suite, whose offerings include communication tools (mail, chat), office tools and collaborative solutions. These solutions remain very generalist and leave a gap for specialists such as Workplace by Facebook, Trello, Slack, Evernote.

Guillaume answers to questions about what’s new for Office 365

Office 365 is the solution that offers the best continuity with the conventional work environment and the most important functional coverage. The vendor is gradually integrating the multiple tools within Teams, Yammer and Sharepoint, the 3 pillars of the offer today. Its weak point remains the complexity linked to the wealth of the offer and the impossibility to federate or articulate instances between the business units of a company.

Google offers a disruptive offering from conventional office work with a new approach for team collaboration. The offer is seen as «degraded» by those who are on conventional uses and as «effective» by those who adopt the new collaborative uses.

In practice, the price is not a discriminating factor, a budget of 20 €/users/month is necessary with the two vendors.

Specialists have great opportunities

Workplace by Facebook is the solution to disrupt the traditional Intranet and increase network for deskless workers. Facebook promises a meteoric adoption but avoids confronting situations of changes in working practices and even relies on democratized social communication practices. Workplace creates a new, effective internal media. If Workplace is better than Yammer or Google+, will Facebook succeed in convincing its two competitors to create effective bridges with their productivity tools? Slack, Evernote or Trello are aimed at the most demanding teams. Information Systems Departments are beginning to accept these services, which they do not control. The articulation between these solutions, G Suite, Office 365 and Workplace is often with a good quality.

The physical work environment is changing

Niche players like Yellow, Klaxoon, aim to disrupt conventional meetings and reinvent the co-production experience via tactile boards. Microsoft (with Surface Hub) educates the market without revolutionizing it, Google (Jamboard) is not yet present in France. Specialists (like Samsung) are doing well.

Yellow was present on October 11th to demonstrate the full potential of their solution. Their value proposition is at three levels: 1 — Digitize the whiteboard concept, 2 — Reinvent the meeting by stimulating creativity, 3 — Implement a visual management approach.

Many thanks to Dick Lantim, Francis Lim (Yellow) for their participation, and Anne Stoll (Samsung) for lending a Flip!

Dick and Francis (Yellow) are showing the potential of the product

Do companies still have to support the adoption of these solutions?

Yes, judging the level of evolution of the practices observed in the French companies of more than 5000 people: 83% of the collaborators express needs of collaboration, but the email remains the principal tool of collaboration for 66% of them. Working online and in collaborative mode does not come naturally. Experience has shown us that an adaptation effort is made by everyone when a colleague wants to onboard on a new way of working and provides appropriate support. The company needs to recruit these change leaders and help them to succeed, more than dispensing massively trainings for tools as we see too often. The challenge today is to adopt new change management strategies, more local, persistent and economical.

To do this, Lecko develops and provides its customers with a platform to support the transformation actors. The idea is to provide the keys to simply start a tool-based support system. Within this platform, we find the Pick’n’Start tools (strengthening ambassadors with a boarding approach on Office 365 — www.picknst.art), In’Pulse (mobilizing internal transformation actors and bringing the keys to success to initiative leaders — inpulse.app.app.lecko.fr) and Manager Experience (challenging their daily postures in the face of the challenge of “working differently” — www.lecko.fr/mxp/).

We were able to test Manager Experience — MXP on the day of the event, with 60 participants. We organized a competition to test the viral potential of the app with a reward, and to make people want to reproduce this type of format with our customers. That’s also what it means to come to Lecko events 🙂

Jeremy Bombart (Systra) leaves with a drone, after testing MXP and talking about it on social media