Christian Lund, Templafy Co-founder and CEO
2020’s shift to largely remote work shone a bright spotlight on how content drives value for businesses, from emails to documents and presentations, as employees look to maintain business as usual in a new world of work. Content creation has always been challenging for companies. Finding accurate content, using the most updated brand elements and consistent formatting are just some of the elements employees need to consider when creating proposals, deliverables and contracts. And management teams are struggling to align workforces without a centralised way to govern content.
Without an in-office presence and face-to-face meetings, content, which already served as a key driver of business within organizations, became the primary communication tool for workforces around the world. Now business results are even more inextricably tied to business content, with expectations high for creating high quality content quickly. To ensure employees can work efficiently while remote working, businesses downloaded tons of applications to help. However, the underlying issue for management teams and employees alike when creating content is the current technology supporting work is disconnected.
The tech stack deployed is unable to provide management teams with the governance needed to enable employees to create high-quality content effectively. Enterprise Content Management platforms, once hailed as the silver bullet for content, have failed to maintain the agility or successfully innovate to meet businesses’ needs. In turn, this is impacting employee workflows, which are draining productivity and detracting from tasks that benefit businesses. However, this current transition period to remote and hybrid work is an opportunity to correct the flaws in the current tech stack supporting content creation.
The disconnected tech stack is impacting content
The inefficiencies of the enterprise tech stack are now highly evident due to remote work. This ranges from employees collaborating on content with little visibility into the review and edit process, to content being stored in different places, making it harder to access.
These parts and more are contributing to content creation becoming extremely time-consuming. In fact, UK workers spend large amounts of time switching between applications, with 27%, using six to ten different applications each week. Keeping track of information and branding for a substantial piece of content while working with others is difficult.
These technology applications lack solutions that enable management teams to empower employees in creating better business content faster. Instead, businesses are at risk of having disconnected content thanks to siloed technology, which leads to loss of compliance, brand integrity and most importantly negatively affects employee productivity. This risk is exacerbated further by different departments using different solutions, which lead to failed adoption of technology stacks company-wide, acknowledged by 55% of UK workers.
The downfall of Enterprise Content Management solutions
Many management teams have tried to keep content in line with enterprise content management systems (ECM) which provide businesses with a one-stop-shop for managing content including scanned documents, email, reports, medical images and office documents. However, as businesses have evolved, ECM has failed to remain agile with the advances in technology.
Collaboration is fragmented, with a lack of integrations that conform to the new way of working and businesses have little insight into if the content is driving business results. Crucially, ECM is unable to innovate to get ahead of management teams’ needs for generating a wide range of content to benefit financial, legal and marketing teams alike.
The rise of content enablement
Business management teams need to support employees in creating high-quality content which moves the needle for businesses by ensuring their business enablement tech stacks support automation. For instance, systems which automatically update a graphic with the latest sales data can save employees valuable time and crucially reduce potential errors. This also benefits management teams who can spend less time checking presentations on brand compliance and data accuracy and focus on the quality of the content in relation to their business.
Technology that supports the dynamic collaboration process employees are used to pre-pandemic can also enhance employee productivity and engagement. The ability to assign actions on content for specific colleagues and leave clear comments dramatically improves the content creation cycle. This removes time spent by employees trawling through documents to find actions to implement and questioning whether it’s their responsibility to update certain sections. Equally, management teams have a clear idea of employees’ responsibilities with documents, massively improving the workflow.
Crucially, management teams will benefit from technology that provides transparency into the content review process, with tracking and analytics which share how content has performed. A game-changer for alleviating document delivery anxiety and understanding how content is impacting business results.
It’s clear the future of work will not return to pre-pandemic ways for many and the hybrid workforce and flexible working will take its place. However, 39% of UK workers still don’t believe their company has the right tech for hybrid working. Management teams need to consider moving forward technology that will enable employees to build high-quality content and allow employees to focus on adding value to the business.
