Employees Will Use Apps To Manage Work And Personal Life Better.

Question: Discuss about the Employees Will Use Apps To Manage Their Work And Personal Life Better. Answer: Introduction Times are changing like never before. In the fast paced world, technology is providing newer options to have a calculated life. This evolving technology provide challenges for the workplaces in the future, both for the leaders as well as the employees. In the study it is discussed that more and more apps options are available to the employee and employees will use these apps to manage their work and personal life better. The increasingly future usage would require different ways of working both for the leaders, the Human Resource department as well as the employees. The employee today is very cautious for managing their time carefully; in order to effectively use these apps one needs to be techno savvy and should learn to take care of security issues, as the data provided by the employees would be flooded over the web. According to a review of more than 50 apps , it was ascertained that these apps varies from calendaring, note taking, file sharing apps to serene meditation Apps that make the customers to remember to take breaks and be more attentive. The role of leaders is to ensure that the core assets are examined carefully to push the product further. Work is now becoming virtual and can be done anytime and anywhere with the help of personal devices and real time communication. The world is connecting truly with boundary less partnerships with networks and redefining careers which attracts learning, attractiveness and fairness. The management has to ensure that the Rather than having the traditional hierarchies, network structures should be more cooperative and make leadership shared and combined. Implications for Employees Employees are increasingly using more apps to manage both their personal and professional lives. Since few years back , time management apps have multiplied as users all around the world want to grip more productivity even in waking and sleeping hours. People can restrict their time spent on Facebook and concentrate more on their gym by using apps like RescueTime and Toggle. On such apps users can identify a particular task and specify an app to calculate how much time one spends on them. Developers of these apps are further, creating office versions for the professionals shortly. Time management tools are getting much importance these days. The employees feel that especially in a tech job the limited resource is ones own and other people time. More than money, time is a limited resource, therefore these apps are required to manage as well as maximize the resource. Caution on the part of employees while using these apps Employees, who use the apps, promote the use to their counterparts when the issues of productivity and prioritizing crops up in the workplace. In few companies as an internal practice, the teams hold a pitching panel wherein employees could support and promote the acceptance of his or her favorite app. Though it is essential for the users to be technologically equipped, also an efficient business app should be able to separate private data from the business data and give the flexibility to select to report only professional data to avoid piracy issues. The employees need to be extra cautious of their privacy issues in order to use these apps. Though an app that is useful for one may or may not be useful for the other varying upon the working style and the culture of the companies. Time management tools that are designed for the office are complicated than the ones used for private use. It also requires different kinds of data reporting. As, for example, the organization has to select between apps that are from hard drive and the ones that store data in the cloud. These apps will be more and more used in the future as the developers are making it more user friendly and tailor based by taking feedback from the early users to get aid in working out the bugs and have room for more tasks. Types of apps available for emloyees According to a review of more than 50 apps , it was ascertained that these apps varies from calendaring, note taking, file sharing apps to serene meditation Apps that make the customers to remember to take breaks and be more attentive. A recent launched app named Sapience Buddy has called for a wave of self quantification in the U.S, though the largest customers are in Asia Pacific and Europe, but it was America which requested a way to track the personal data. As per the CEO of Timely app, the company targets to end up in large companies (Messinger, 2016). The company started with small self employed professionals and now is moving to the companies. Though the app develops assert that their software has the potential to move up efficiency, but not many have the data to exhibit the increased productivity. Examples of various apps being used The famous brands like Burberry and Starbucks are doing extremely well by offering great app experiences, their apps are as per the individual choices, thereby permitting the companies to target specific messaging to the customer as per the information that the customer likes. Burberry provides to store experience to its customers by providing similar color, design and runway experience to the customers. The Starbucks Mobile order app is also very famous, it allows the consumers to choose their beverages without having to wait in the queue. Even in the hotel industry, hotels use the big data analysis to provide innovative offerings. Hotels have started using collective offerings. Effective leadership along with acceptance of digital is a paramount importance, Digital transformation is not about creating a digital department by recruiting thousands to work for the company with the objective of reaching other thousands through mobile devices on Facebook , Instagram. All it requires is an excellent top down leadership with a reliable message that digitization is not the most happening things to do, rather instead it is a core focus for the industry (Brynjolfsson Mitchell, 2017). Implications for business leaders and managers The implications for business leaders and managers are that they have to follow one or more steps as laid down henceforth. Like Uber and Airbnb it is essential to redesign the industry by completely altering the present industry. Secondly, like the United States post office, the leaders need to redesign the product. Then next step is for the leaders to support in creating a new digital ecosystem. In this ecosystem the sub markets can exit together like Apple and Amazon. The fourth step is to recreate the path to the customer as did by think lemonade.com. In this step the companies have to be separated from their consumers by a mediator on which they are reliant, hence finding out options to reach the consumer without risking the present distribution channel. The next step is to change the value proposition (Huckstep, 2016). For example rideshare insurance like GEICO Farmers, provides not only cover standard personal automobile use as per premiums but also inserts insurance coverage Role of managers and leaders in the world of apps There are certain Proposition for leaders and Managers. There are three components of healthy vision for leadership. Firstly is to define the core assets, when a digital design has to be prepared core assets needs to be examined carefully to push the product further. Example Yellow pages consider their thousand of sales employees as their core assets. They motivate people to convert their paper ads to digital services through YP.com. This site has 55 million customers each month. Similarly, Google has many online customers. Second, is to have a core mission statement for the organization which is not just a slogan, but a transformative statement for changing organization. Like GE has done similar with its Industrial Internet Concept. Example Barnes and Noble mission statement is to operate as a best retail business in the US, apart from the product they sell. Their mission is to exist different from its product they sell and lower the importance of its being a bookseller. It would be better if the mission statement doesnt contradict itself. The third component is comprised of defining results that is for what the company intends to do and how leadership effect will impact the efforts. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts did this a decade ago when they first aspired to be a brand that will go for digital luxury fashion house. Today digital is placed at the heart of the Burberry and all is its activities are digital. Their vision of digitalization came from the CEOs vision and thus it became the most liked digital brand. Employees dont accept anything, just like that; they accept it when the vision comes from their leaders. Leaders need to should value of that thing before requesting the staff to accept it. And lastly is Governance, If there is a large company, Managers are requested to take their projects home otherwise the company will end, making multiple apps developed through multiple vendors and all doing the same or the other things related to organization. There should be synchronization among different departments related to communication, coordination, which does not come on its own, but a leader or top management aspires to do so (Harsh, 2017). In other words, good governance will bring consistency and will prevent repetition of tasks; this is the single and most important component of success behind the digital transformation of the project. Role of Leaders in streamling the future of using apps Leaders need to work in a more systematic process, as the future requires them to be systematic in case they want to be successful. In the present times most of the data required to mark, understand and accept for the workforce is not gathered in a systematic way. The paradox of our Information age is, in spite of huge data available online, decision maker usually lacks timely and accurate information at the right time. Example: Although digital technologies are being used in many customer services like to collect data in the US Government or to collect Population survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they are not able to collect accurate data as they dont ask relevant questions. Researchers and Economists try to manage this by doing their own surveys, but again, they lack credibility, scale and scope. Government administrative data like tax forms also provide a good source of data, but this needs to be combined with government survey data to increase its credibility. Changes in organizational structures and role of leadership in relation to it Organizations need to increasingly be transparent towards its stakeholders and needs to be more flexible and transforming towards more balanced and relationship based projects. Talents are engaged on collective purpose. Rather than the traditional hierarchies, network structures should be more cooperative and make leadership shared and combined. Work is now becoming virtual and can be done anytime and anywhere with the help of personal devices and real time communication. The world is connecting truly with boundary less partnerships with networks and redefining careers which attracts learning, attractiveness and fairness. There is a huge change in technology. Instruments like robots, sensors, artificial intelligence and Internet is shaping the work system, making more flexible, transparent and all the workforces are accepting it successfully (RSS, 2015). This leads to business transformation. Organization and workers are balancing flexibility and changes with the help of engaging automation service to adapt to new changes. Human automation services like big data, algorithms are decreasing the work of humans. These works were done by human and is replaced by these services. Organization is designing their work for better optimization rather the becoming an interference in the work. These trends are important to understand for leaders to know where there is organization currently stands and where is it moving towards. It understands how these approaches; strategies are changed to keep up with the organization (Daniel, 2013). Role of HR in supporting the future change process of using more apps by employees Business mobility is becoming popular with a motive of business re-engineering. The behavior of employees will be changed; they will have to collaborate with colleagues in respect to different projects. The HRs role will be to get Rules and regulations incorporated into mobile apps based on an employees role. They would decide how the app will be used. As employees become more mobile and their collaboration is increasing with other colleagues it would result in more security and progress in the mobile application management. To manage security and monitor the next generation mobile apps, IT will have to incorporate powerful policies and rules based on the behavior of the application. Luckily, mobile application solutions are available with more flexibility and it would support HR in the continues monitoring of employees as updates and alerts are sent timely. By providing safe and reliable data on their mobile it will increase its usage and adoption by the users (Boudreau, 2016). This will increase innovation and unleash productivity so that employees can become entrepreneurial in their roles. The HR has a very crucial role to play as a change agent as more autonomy will have to be given to the employees in case they have to successfully fulfill their entrepreneurial role (Bhattacharjee, 2017). Examples of companies where HR has transformed themselves The HR of Companies like Twitter and Uber use lower tech apps which email to their employees asking about their whole day work accomplishment tasks. The idea is to make employees work more as they know email will come at any time. As people are already using time management apps, it will be difficult for business to ask employees to shift to apps rather than leaving their own. The best time management system works only, when it becomes part of their daily work, so swapping it with new rituals might impact their productivity negatively (Glass, 2017)s. Support of HR activities Though , technology is evolving, but management and structure evolve slowly. Earlier, work relationship was faster and cheaper and used by personal devices and human resource information system. This includes call centers, operations from a remote location with software like IBM, Watson, etc. Many HR activities are today supported by automating traditional employment systems and work relationship through smart phones, remote performance etc.New Employment models are evolving which includes projects, gigs, contracts, but their involvement is slow. Innovations can also be in the form of employment systems like freelancers, contractors, recruitment system in organization. This encourages communication using social media tools (WN News, 2017).. Conclusion The study discusses that the future of employees is using more apps to better manage their work effectively. This calls for a lot of implications both from the employees side as well as the leadership and HR side. There are various example discussed in the study about how the apps have changed the life for the better. The Starbucks Mobile order allows the consumers to choose their beverages without having to wait in the queue. Even in the hotel industry, hotels use the big data analysis to provide innovative offerings. Hotels have started using collective offerings. Today digitization is placed at the heart of the most companies and all is its activities are digital. Their vision of digitalization should come from great leadership as the employees dont accept anything, just like that; they accept it when the vision comes from their leaders. Leaders need to value that thing before requesting the staff to accept it. The HRs role will also be increased and altered tremendously from inco rporating rules and regulations into mobile apps based on an employees role to ensuring the email of completion that has to be sent to the employees is timed rightly. References Bhattacharjee, A. (2017, May 02). DigitalTransformation, Humanity the Future - Keynote Address to Corporations . Retrieved from https://techygeekshome.blogspot.in/2017/05/digitaltransformation-humanity-future.html Boudreau, J. (2016, March 17). Work in the Future Will Fall into These 4 Categories. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/03/work-in-the-future-will-fall-into-these-4-categories Brynjolfsson, E., Mitchell, T. (2017, April 17). We Must Track How Technology Is Changing Work. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-must-track-how-technology-is-changing-work/ Daniel, Y. (2013, August). The Future of Mobile Application Management. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/08/the-future-of-mobile-application-management/ Glass, B. (2017, April 17). Nature: We Must Track How Technology Is Changing Work. Retrieved from https://burning-glass.com/nature/ Harsh, A. (2017, january 05). Digital Transformation, Humanity the Future - Keynote Address to Corporations. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/digital-transformation-humanity-the-future-keynote_us_5907c064e4b084f59b49fc09 Huckstep, R. (2016, September 12). Lemonade are Live. Insurance will never be the same again! Retrieved from https://www.the-digital-insurer.com/blog/insurtech-lemonade-are-here-and-insurance-will-never-be-the-same-again/ Messinger, L. (2016). Do time management apps really make people more productive? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/18/time-management-apps-work-life-balance-productivity RSS. (2015). Do time management apps really make people more productive? Retrieved from https://thecirculareconomist.com/do-time-management-apps-really-make-people-more-productive/ WN News. (2017, April 17). We Must Track How Technology is Changing Work. Retrieved from https://article.wn.com/view/2017/04/17/We_Must_Track_How_Technology_is_Changing_Work/