No Jitter asked frequent contributor Beth Schultz for her thoughts on the year that was and the year that will be – with respect to digital workplace trends.
Carrying forward from 2023, one of the biggest digital workplace trends I see is the continued move toward connected workspaces for collaborative work management (CWM). This trend crosses market segments, from productivity to project management, content collaboration/management, and, increasingly, team collaboration apps.
Just looking at the latter group, we’ve seen Slack continuing to expand beyond team messaging to support content creation/sharing, collaboration, notes, and lightweight project/task management all within team workspaces. Similarly, Zoom Workplace now features Docs, for content creating/sharing, collaboration, templates for project briefs and tracking, and an information hub for creating knowledge bases and wikis. Microsoft, of course, also supports such capabilities. Microsoft Loop is one example, for content and project co-creation and collaboration.
AI assistance and automation come into play for each of the above-cited products, as well as elsewhere across the digital workplace—and it almost goes without saying that AI has been a major trend in 2024. This includes everything from AI-powered scheduling and advanced meeting features to writing assistance, automating project creation and task assignment, surfacing insights from reports and other content, providing next-best-action recommendations, and much more.
Companies demanding RTO aren’t necessarily outliers, but they’re definitely in the minority. In tracking hybrid work strategies, we’ve seen the percentage of companies requiring full-time in-office work almost double from 2021 to 2024. But this group still accounts for less than a quarter of companies.
At this stage, what companies are more likely to be doing is increasing their requirements around time spent in the office. Metrigy’s recent Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025 study shows that nearly 37% of companies require in-office work today—with the average requirement being three times per week. This is up from 27% in 2023. And looking forward to 2025, 25% say they plan on requiring more in-office days.
That said, almost 32% say they’ll allow more remote work. So, as my colleague Irwin Lazar points out in his recent post, “Hybrid Work Driving Office Evolution,” hybrid work strategies continue to be in a state of flux. Companies implement change, assess the impact of this change on various factors, including productivity and turnover, and then adjust the hybrid work plan to meet current business priorities—again and again.
First, let me say that even as companies are continuously assessing the in-office vs. at-home balance, we don’t see evidence that they’re planning to scale back meeting rooms. In fact, our Employee Engagement Optimization study shows an expected increase in meeting space from 30.2% of overall floorspace today to 33.5% by the end of 2025.
Second, within those meeting rooms, we see a few trends leading to growing deployment of various types of video meeting equipment. One example is “bring your own compute” (BYOC), which is an alternative to room systems that contain their own compute for running meetings, typically today via one-touch-join. To support a growing desire for BYOC, equipment providers have begun offering systems that allow users to connect their laptops or use an external PC to run meeting apps. Other examples are devices or technologies that let meeting participants share content to video displays and in touch-screen video monitors, for enabling control and application interaction.
Neat is a good example of a video equipment provider that has enhanced its portfolio in 2024 to address such trends. It now provides the ability to run meetings in BYOC mode, and it introduced the all-in-one touch-enabled Neat Board Pro, which includes the ability to bring collaboration and other work-related apps into a meeting through the company’s new App Hub.
I’ll answer this from the perspective of connected workspaces for CWM, which is where I’ve focused a lot of my research efforts this year.
CWM is great from the perspective that it gives employees one connected workspace from which they can plan for and accomplish their work, in a streamlined way with AI and automation, across different work apps integrated in their workspaces, and in collaboration with other team members. It’s great to see merging of categories, so that employees using Slack for team messaging or Zoom Workplace for meetings can now also stay within a familiar interface to coordinate and accomplish other work, for example.
But therein lies a danger, too—will the adoption of different sort of connected workspace tools create silos by teams or projects, and therefore foster disconnectedness among employees? That would be contrary to the purpose of these apps and collaboration goals in general! This is all to say, I think it’s important for companies to take a close look at all of the connected workspace for CWM tools they have in place to determine whether they can standardize on one or integrate across them to eliminate silos. This becomes particularly important when embracing AI-empowered capabilities and establishing a consistent source of data for AI.
I’m not expected any earthshaking new trends, but the continued evolution of trends that have been developing over the last few years, including those discussed here—continued development and adoption of connected workspaces for CWM, increased reliance on AI assistance for employee experience, collaboration, and work management use cases, and continuously evolving hybrid work strategies.
Check out more of Schultz’s recent articles:
Six Key Considerations for Evaluating a Connected Workspaces: Ease of use is the top decision factor, but app integration, dashboards, AI capabilities, and other criteria come into play as well, according to Metrigy research.
Connected Workspace Apps: Driven by the need to gain control and optimize costs, many companies are looking to standardize on a single connected workspace app for collaborative work management.
8 Practices Leading to Success with Connected Workspace Apps: A look at characteristics of the success group from Metrigy’s recent research on connected workspaces for collaborative work management.
