Yes, IT, HR, and Facilities Can (and Should) CollaborateYes, IT, HR, and Facilities Can (and Should) Collaborate
Partnering with IT and facilities teams might be the keys HR needs to improve work spaces and the employee experience.
February 18, 2020
If you're an advocate within your enterprise for greater collaboration between IT, HR, and Facilities — or if you'd like to be — you should definitely check out LinkedIn's 2019 Global Talent Trends survey. You'll get some great nuggets of supporting evidence to take to your colleagues and managers to persuade them that these holistic efforts pay off. (Thanks to Scott McMaster of Arkadin, whose recent post on our sister site, No Jitter, pointed me to the survey.)
LinkedIn surveyed 5,164 talent professionals and hiring managers and found that the four most important trends transforming the workplace are:
Soft skills
Work flexibility
Anti-harassment
Pay transparency
The second trend — flexibility — provides the best examples of ways that IT, HR, and Facilities/Real Estate leaders can work together to improve employee engagement. For example, one of the major work flexibility trends is, not surprisingly, the continued growth of remote work, and the continued need to refine policies and tools to support remote workers and make them feel like part of a team, whether that team is mostly based in an office, or scattered around the globe.
According to LinkedIn's respondents, the biggest remote work challenges are:
Team bonding
Collaboration
Work oversight
What works best to overcome these challenges? The survey identified the three top solutions as:
Instant messaging
Audio conferencing
Video conferencing
What struck me about this list is how doable it is. Most or all knowledge workers in your enterprise probably already use instant messaging. Audio conferencing is a legacy technology that you may or may not be providing through newer-generation Unified Communications tools. Video — which is probably what most of us imagine is the best way to link remote workers together — only ranks third. That said, your options for video are getting better, easier, and cheaper all the time.
How do you make these technologies work best for your enterprise's particular needs? For talent professionals, the LinkedIn report suggests: "Partner with teams outside of HR.... Work with your IT and facilities teams from the beginning to ensure you're supporting employees and efficiently using your space."
