Empowering employees to drive innovation in a hybrid world

Flexible work is about more than location and schedules. In an era where hybrid work is becoming the norm, it is essential for businesses to connect with their teams in the simplest and most efficient ways possible. By harnessing technology, organisations can introduce solutions that eliminate silos and enable collaboration exactly when and where it is needed.

Technology has provided the workforce with vast opportunities, which has led to a renewed focus on equipping employees with tools that help them work as efficiently and effectively as possible — from anywhere, at any time. With nearly 40% of IT leaders in the APAC region already using low-code development tools, it is clear that this is one technology-led area where businesses are already seeing immense success.

Empowering all employees

No-code technology refers to tools or a platform that enable employees to build solutions and create applications without the need or ability to write code. They typically offer intuitive, easy-to-use configuration options, making it possible for anyone to create and design workflows and solutions independent of IT support.

So why does this matter? Because democratising innovation opens the door for businesses to tap into a frequently underused resource: the ideas and experiences of its workforce. In a business environment where innovation is at the top of the agenda, responsibility for this too often sits with a select few. While having specific teams leading these responsibilities is not a bad thing, siloed innovation can lead to dysfunction, inefficiencies and frustration, not to mention slowing the pace of change.

Ideally, everyone within the organisation should be responsible and have a say when it comes to innovation. The basis of any innovation is a problem or opportunity that requires a solution and understanding a problem requires hands-on experience. This is why the majority of the workforce, those who are on the frontline day in and day out, are well placed to tackle these problems. No-code technology platforms empower these employees to bring ideas to life, solving the challenges they face daily and making innovation a business-wide responsibility.

Creating meaningful, long-term impact

Innovation can be as simple as introducing new processes that create small, but meaningful efficiencies in how the business runs. For instance, an employee working in the warehouse might create a better solution to organise the inventory or manage the schedules of other employees rather than the IT department. If these incremental changes continue to happen across an organisation, what might seem like marginal gains individually build upon each other and can create a significant impact in aggregate.

As such, no-code not only enables workers to be more innovative but can also give organisations an edge over their competition. Empowering employees at every level to create impactful work also benefits their performance, enhancing their engagement with work and overall professional satisfaction. With the global growth rate for low-code developers being over 2.7 times that of the general developer population, this technology is ultimately redefining the work all employees are able to do and stretching their potential.

Relieving the pressure on IT

Employees empowered by no-code technology have the freedom to explore and are equipped with the right tools to achieve their goals. However, there are other big benefits like the decreased workload for the IT department and developers.

By design, no-code has simple-to-use configuration options and minimum jargon, and is extremely easy to learn with little instruction.

This gives IT teams the benefit of being less resource-constrained and thinly stretched because they no longer have to invest time into building and maintaining department- or team-specific applications. That’s not to say that no-code platforms should not be reviewed and approved by the organisation’s IT team, but by empowering a majority of the workforce to build their own solutions via an IT-approved platform, IT can focus on more strategic and business-critical operations.

This is particularly important in the current Australian climate, in which 52% of Australian CEOs say it’s more difficult than ever to hire in their industry due to the lack of skilled workers. Australian businesses need to ensure they are maximising the skills of their existing workforce.

With flexible work now being a common workplace model, it is essential for employees to have access to the right technology no matter where they are, or what their technical skill level is. By adopting a no-code approach, businesses are able to increase employee engagement by improving the way they and their teams work. In turn, organisations will gain a wealth of knowledge from their employees’ experiences that would otherwise go untapped, and foster a culture of business-wide innovation that solves important problems that can differentiate them from the competition.

Image credit: iStock.com/Andrei Metelev