Experts from Okta, Deloitte, and Verizon share how technology enables the future of work in a safe and collaborative way

• Employees want to come to the office to connect, so businesses should embrace the environment.
• One study found that knowledge workers waste 32 days per year toggling between apps and saving work.
• The conversation was part of Insider's event "Insider At CES: How Emerging Technologies Influence the Future of Work," which took place on Thursday, January 5, 2023.

Businesses with dynamic working environments are now in a position where they can attract and retain any talent, more diverse talent, and talent from all across the globe, said Alvina Antar, the chief information officer at digital identity firm Okta.

"People want to come to the office to engage and collaborate," Antar said during Insider's recent virtual event, "How Emerging Technologies Influence the Future of Work," which took place on Thursday, January 5.

"The reason why we have issues with retention is people don't feel connected to the company that they're a part of because many, many employees haven't even met their coworkers," Antar said. "And so now the location is a place to bond and create meaning."

At this hour-long event surrounding CES 2022, presented by Lenovo in partnership with Verizon, Paayal Zaveri, a senior tech reporter at Insider, spoke with Antar and other future-of-work experts and business leaders about how technology enables the future of work in a safe and collaborative way.

Vijay Paulrajan, vice president of devices at Verizon Business Group, said that employee expectations are accelerating as they see the pace of consumer change and innovation.

"Something that we're starting to hear back from our customers is technologies they want to invest in, not just in the context of providing customer benefits, but also for employee purposes," he said.

"While we monitor the economic climate, I fully anticipate — especially as 5G wireless technologies get deployed even further and faster — there's going to be some new exciting use cases that we're going to go after and solve for our customers with unique solutions."

Steve Hatfield, a global future-of-work leader and principal at Deloitte, said businesses need to ask whether technologies and workplace designs were built for physical spaces that have been transformed into remote environments.

"The typical knowledge worker will waste about 32 days a year doing things like toggling between the apps on the desktop or saving work that's been lost," he said.

Hatfield said that a key benefit of the new digital environment is that talent can be sourced anywhere.

"It shifts the dialogue on who is your workforce really," he said. "How do we think about the different talent models that can bring different players to the fore to get things done when you need them, and source the skills you need as you need them?"

Before the pandemic, around 4% of the US workforce was remote or hybrid — now it's somewhere near half the population, Hatfield said. It's predicted that up to 25% of the global workforce will continue to work remotely in a substantive way.

"The typical engineer, for example, spends 70% of her time trying to find the data. The typical nurse spends 50% of her time or his time trying to do the admin. The issue becomes one of how can we bring the technologies to the table to elevate what humans do and get rid of some of that work underneath," he said.