Technology has made our personal lives easier than ever. But it’s complicating things in the office. On any given day, the average employee spends nearly 65 percent of their time on busy work and in meetings, 20 percent searching for information and just 15 percent doing what they want and are paid to do. Why? Because technology that was supposed to streamline work has only made it more complex, according to Citrix Systems, Inc.

However, the company notes that it is out to change this. The company in December announced general availability of new features within Citrix Workspace including an intelligent feed and personalised workflows designed to simplify work by eliminating digital noise and automating meaningless tasks so that employees can focus on their core jobs and be their best.

“As consumers, we rely on things like Instagram and Uber to organize and manage our lives. And with a single click, we can accomplish what we set out to do,” commentedTim Minahan, executive vice president of strategy and chief marketing officer at Citrix. “Then we get to the office and these streamlined and personalized experiences are replaced with company-issued technology that is cumbersome to use, slows us down, continually interrupts us, and keeps us from doing meaningful work.”

Quieting the Noise

In the course of a typical day, employees:

·         Use more than a dozen apps to get work done – often four or more just to complete a single business process like submitting expenses, booking travel, submitting purchase orders or approving time off.

·         Spend at least 20 percent of their time searching for information they need to do their jobs

·         Are interrupted by a text, chat, or other alert 1110 times a day, or about every two minutes.

“When you add it all up, that leaves just 1.2 hours of uninterrupted time a day to focus on value-creating work,” Minahan said.

Enabling the Future of Work Today

But this is about to change. By 2021, IDC predicts that 60 percent of Global 2000 companies will have adopted a future-workspace model —a flexible, intelligent, collaborative virtual/physical work environment —to improve employee experience and productivity, with 10 percent adopting workspace as a service. And Citrix asserted that it will be at the forefront of this transformation.

“The future of work has recently become a common theme from a broad range of technology vendors and service providers.  Some can clearly articulate that theme, but it takes a combination of work abstraction and application/client virtualization technologies to practically deliver the future-space,” noted IDC analyst Shannon Kalvar. 

Personalising Work

Using Citrix Workspace, companies can optimize the work day for every employee by organizing, guiding and automating work in an intelligent and personal way that enables them to focus on doing what they do best - and do it best.

 “At the end of the day, employees want to master their craft,” Minahan said. “With Citrix Workspace, employers can empower them to do so by freeing them from soul sucking tasks so that they can focus on building their skills and engaging work.”

Unbundling Monolithic Apps

Infused with innovative technologies such as machine learning and micro applications, Citrix Workspace enables organisations to create a single, unified and experience that is intelligent and secure across apps and data. Leveraging out of the box integrations to the world’s most commonly used applications, including SAP (Ariba, Concur and SuccessFactors); Microsoft (Dynamics, Power BI and Teams); Google G-Suite (Drive, Calendar and Directory); Salesforce; Workday; Atlassian (Jira); Zendesk and ServiceNow; more than 100 pre-configured microapps and the new intelligent features, companies can:

• Automate repetitive, valueless tasks.
• Extract the most pertinent tasks and insights from systems of record and deliver them in intelligent feeds to individual users on any device or channel.

• Create single-purpose steps to simplify the execution of mundane tasks such as filing expenses, requesting time off and submitting purchase orders, among other things.
• Build personal workflows around individual employees with context and smarts so they can spend less time on menial tasks and focus on meaningful work.

In addition, companies can also connect through Citrix Workspace to legacy, homegrown systems and create engaging micro applications and micro automation using low-code tooling.

“With Citrix, we have a partner on our side who covers all the important issues around delivering applications, desktops and data,” said Bernd Dausch, Chief Technical Officer Datacenter, Schuster & Walther IT-Kanzlei GmbH. “In the next few years, the demand for automated workflows and intelligent tools will continue to grow in law firms. With Citrix Workspace, we can address these exact issues.”

Using Citrix Workspace, companies can remove the complexity from work and create a highly personalised experience that enables employees to be their most productive and use the special skills they were hired for to create value. And this is exactly what Citrix partners like Fujitsu are aiming to help them do.

 “The intelligent feed and personalise workflows that Citrix has brought to market today are truly innovative and will bolster our ability to help companies deliver a simple, consumer-like work experience that enhances their employee experience and in turn, their business,” concluded Tim White, corporate executive officer, SVP, head of Global Delivery Group, Fujitsu.

Click here to learn more about the new features and how Citrix Workspace can help your organisation transform the employee experience and deliver the future of work today or take a look at the video below.