Adobe’s people-centric culture has been a hallmark of our success since the company’s founding in 1982, and we are very pleased to have recently been named a 2021 Great Place To Work-Certified company in Singapore.
Last year, when it became clear that work was never going back to the way things were, we saw an opportunity and the need to reimagine the employee experience and develop a future of work approach that leverages the best of in-person and virtual interactions to foster creativity, innovation, and culture.
Digital experiences are transforming how people connect, work, learn, and play. The acceleration of digital in the last 18 months has massively changed the nature of work– and that in turn, has changed the way employees are expecting to work today and post-pandemic.
Adobe put together a team composed of members from different functions to learn from the best of the last year and a half and set the vision for how we would work next.
We conducted interviews and focus groups with hundreds of employees, managers and leaders across various locations, organisations, and tenure, and we regularly surveyed our global employee population to draw a vast array of insights to both inform our plans and test our hypotheses to create a future model that would work best for Adobe.
Here’s what we found.
The future of work at Adobe will be hybrid
- Being digital-first will be critical: As the digital experiences company, we will double down on digital tools and workflows across the employee experience – from onboarding and career development to collaboration and community, to enable our people to be productive working wherever they are.
- Flexibility will be the default: Adobe employees will have the option to work from home approximately 50 per cent of the time and in the office the remainder of the time. We’re empowering individuals and teams to figure out the working cadences that are best for them.
- We’ll gather for the moments that matter: We will have an intentional mix of physical and virtual presences, with in-person gatherings driven by purpose and designed for collaboration.
- Remote work will expand: We believe in the value of in-person interactions however we know that in some cases, a remote work arrangement makes sense for Adobe and the individual. So, we’ve established criteria and guidelines on remote work which we’ll be rolling out in phases globally, and then continue to learn and iterate to make this model successful.
Also Read: A new approach to hybrid working: Let the employees decide when, how and where to work
The employee experience evolution
Adobe’s sweet spot is at the intersection of technology and creativity, so it’s only natural that we lean into our strengths to design the workplace of the future. Our aim is to provide an exceptional employee experience, regardless of location, and intentionally leverage the best of different workplace settings.
We recognise the work-from-home era isn’t necessarily reflective of the future, but there’s the behavioural insight we can draw to inform how we work in this next chapter.
For example, we’ve increasingly traded email for real-time messaging; the desire for community building and informal interactions has heightened, and we’re seeing greater adoption of asynchronous collaboration methods in place of meetings.
At the centre of this transformation is our new smart digital campus app– Adobe Life –an award-winning digital experience, designed with Adobe products, as a solution to power our new hybrid workforce.
As with everything we do, Adobe Life was created with our people in mind, drawing insights from employees’ workstyles, workflows, and workspaces. The app is ripe with functionality to help employees stay productive, connected, informed, and well.
It meets employees where they are. Each office has its own digital campus in the app, serving as a hub of curated news and information catered to their location, including re-entry updates, wayfinding, and conference room bookings.
Employees can stay connected to each other with personalised community engagement and custom notifications powered by artificial intelligence.
And this is just the beginning. We recognise that we have a lot to learn and that evolving how we work will be a long-term transformation. The hybrid future of work is here to stay, and we know that one size doesn’t fit all.
Organisations, large and small, will need to determine how that ‘hybrid’ will look like for them and start putting in place the digital solutions they will need to build that future.
One challenge that many organisations face when transforming for the future of work is legacy workflows. In today’s fast-changing environment, addressing the issue of legacy systems means moving to more flexible technologies that digitise more or all of the workflow steps, and using cloud-based services to deliver this quickly and at a more optimal cost.
Also Read: How to be an effective product team manager as your team grows
To help with that, Adobe has recently announced the availability of Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service hosted locally in the Microsoft Azure Southeast Asia region data centre located in Singapore, bringing expanded digital experience management and e-signing capabilities onshore to support local organisations in their future of work vision.
We’ve also introduced the new Live Sign in Microsoft Teams – available later this year – that will offer e-signing that feels like an in-person experience. For example, remote teams can go through the details of a project document on a Teams video call while capturing their e-signatures for approvals – all without leaving Teams.
As remote and hybrid work becomes a mainstay of the future of work, we can expect to see more digital innovations incorporated into employee experience and workflows.
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