Our plans for creating a happy work-life – CEO story

Our colleague Merel Saarloos (Product Marketeer) interviewed Erik Nicolai (CEO and Co-Founder) about our plans for 2022 and how we want to create a happy work-life for our customers, partners and colleagues. In this article you’ll discover more about our plans for 2022, the next-generation workspace and what we mean by a happy work-life.

Rather watch the on-demand session? You can do that here! 👇🏻

What does ‘happy work-life’ mean?

In this article, I’ll mention ‘happy work-life’ multiple times. But what does it really mean?  We think that people choose work for a reason and want to help them to focus on their core tasks. However, what a happy work-life is might be different for everyone. So, here is a short break-down:

What it means for our customers

We want to help IT, Information and Communication leaders to be recognized for their work. We do this by helping you unite everything that employees need in one hybrid workspace, including information and communication flows. By bringing information and tasks from external applications, and integrating the intranet in the digital workspace, we allow people to stay connected with the company and colleagues.

This way, we also want to reduce the complexity, so that people can focus on their work, without worrying about IT. This means that when they open their digital workspace they have insights in their applications, information, documents, company news, intranet and more. As we have already helped thousands of organisations to transition to a modern digital workspace, we are ready to provide you with advice to have a smooth transition.

What it means for our own organisation

For Workspace 365 employees it means giving employees the flexibility to get their work done from any location at any time.

“I want this to be the best time of your life, of your working life, where you can flourish and be the best version of yourself.”- Erik Nicolai, CEO and Co-Founder of Workspace 365

We’re creating programs for people to help them become the best version of themselves, by setting personal goals. Each employee defines their own personal goals to match them with our company goals. And eventually, we will also develop training materials to help our customers to do the same because having a digital workspace is great, knowing how to get the most benefit from it, is the way to create a true impact on the work-life of people.

Plans for Workspace 365 in 2022

Each year we set up goals, and this year we have a couple of important elements we want to focus on. Since the beginning of Workspace 365 we have focussed on simplifying the digital employee experience, and help people by conquering complexity to make sure they can focus on their job.

Building a global presence

We’ve built a huge partner network from Canada all the way to New Zealand, but our strongest network is in the Netherlands. But we want to become even smarter in helping people around the globe. That’s why last year we’ve opened our first office in the United Kingdom, and are also planning on opening an open an office in the USA, in the Boston area later this year.

This way, we can research what people in those countries need, develop specific integrations, discover cultural differences, offer local support and focus on conquering complexity for them. This also means that our offices will be independent hubs. Starting with the UK office, meaning that the office will have their own Customer Success, Support, Marketing and Sales teams.

Starting a movement: Focus on the Employee Experience

If we want to help people across the globe, we also need to build a movement that is focussed on improving the employee experience. That’s why we have create our own Workspace Academy for our colleagues, partners, customers and anyone who wants to join.

You’ll see more of the Workspace Academy this year, so stay tuned and be ready to join our global movement, where eventually you can join physical and online events.

Product roadmap: Next-Generation Workspace

We gather feedback from our partners and customers to improve our digital workspace. This year, we want to bring our product to the next level to increase the impact it has on contributing to a happier work-life.

A lot of organisations have similar processes, like submitting expense claims, requesting holidays and accessing salary slips. Our goal is to simplify these secondary processes by developing Micro Apps, and connect these processes to your organisations existing systems to allow people to perform actions straight from the workspace.

This way, we can combine primary tasks together with secondary processes in one single overview. This can already be partially done with our Activity Feed that connects to any API but this year we will focus on simplifying these processes even more.

Mobile App coming up

One of the exciting things we will launch in the coming period, is the Workspace 365 native mobile app. With this app we give employees a great digital experience on their mobile phone. The last couple of months we’ve already been working hard on improving the mobile experience in the browser. So, stay tuned for an even better experience.

We aggregate all the information that’s important for employees together in one digital workspace, to create a unique experience. We’ve noticed that information is becoming more relevant and important for employees. That’s why we want to bring more data from other applications to the digital workspace, to allow employees to have a unified view of all their applications and information. More importantly, as there is a lot of information available, we want to help Information Managers to filter what information certain departments or roles need in their workspace to keep their focus on core tasks.

CEO vision on the market for 2022

If we look at the market, a lot has changed the last couple of years. When we had conversations with customers three or four years ago, we mainly spoke to IT management about moving to the cloud, and the importance of the browser.

Now, the employee experience has become very important, and the way we present all their applications in one overview. Also, there are more people involved than just IT management, like information managers, communication managers, and business analysts to create the ideal digital workspace for each role in the organisation.

Mobile workforce

With the COVID-19 pandemic being here for already two years, organisations realised that they needed to become more flexible as a company. The mobile workforce has increased and the expectations are that in a lot of organisations, people don’t come back to the office for 40 hours a week, but will work flexibly from any location and any time.

One of the most important things for these companies, is that they still have to maintain the company culture and make sure the employees stay connected to the organisation. They still need to feel united as a team, and a digital workspace like Workspace 365 contributes to that.

More than just an application portal

Workspace 365 integrates applications, documents, information, news, and intranet in one personalised digital workspace, which employees can access from any location at any time.

“Today, it’s not just about the applications, it’s about the information.”- Erik Nicolai, CEO and Co-Founder of Workspace 365

We don’t just combine all the applications people need during their workday, but we focus on bringing the information they need to the digital workspace. By simplifying primary and secondary processes in one digital workspace, they can save a lot of time searching for the right information and switching between applications.