The end of 2017 offers a chance to reflect on the past year. But it’s also about looking ahead to what the future holds. That is the case on Twitter, with the best stories of the month concerning enterprise trends to look out for in 2018. From the future of remote working to team communication apps, we’ve got the best of Twitter in December covered. If you haven’t already, remember to follow us @teamharmonie!

1. Find out the #EnterpriseProductivity expert's trends for 2018, and the upcoming technology that will help employees get more done next year ow.ly/p97m30hoash via @cmswire #AI #FutureOfWork

In our increasingly connected world, we have more devices and applications available to complete tasks than ever. But this comes with the challenge of how we tie all these apps together.

A focus for the year ahead, then, is to understand individuals’ work patterns across their business apps, and adapting to how employees actually get their work done. Progress is already being made. Microsoft’s Graph technology has made inroads into understanding the network of colleagues an employee is connected to, to help push relevant information towards them.

In his post for CMS Wire, Yaacov Cohen discusses the future of work, our workplace habits and other enterprise productivity trends for 2018. Read more here.

2. Is your business facing #InformationOverload? We've formed the "Humanizing the Digital Workplace Consortium" to help you fight this issue. Meet our team and how we can help you! http://ow.ly/b0BC30hauPd #DigitalWorkplace #Productivity

With more information being generated and consumed every day, and more applications available to harness this data, we are at risk of being lost in a sea of facts and figures. Information Overload is a very real concern—employees can become overwhelmed by the amount of data and applications they must deal with to get their work done.

To address the growing problem of information overload, harmon.ie has formed an independent consortium of multidisciplinary experts to help reduce its impact on worker productivity. It is called “Humanizing the Digital Workplace Consortium”, and will examine why, exactly, companies make the mistake of prioritizing the latest technology rather than understanding the way their employees work.

David Lavenda of harmon.ie explains: “Companies have struggled to maximize their workers’ efforts for the past decade with little to show for it. This is an issue with huge implications and I couldn’t think of a better group of people to examine all of the factors that have led us to this point, while offering ideas on how to overcome this challenge.”

Amy Morin is a psychotherapist and lecturer at Northeastern University and one of the experts in the new “Humanizing the Digital Workplace Consortium”. Of the launch of the consortium, she said: “Giving employees the power to choose their location during work hours is an important step towards increasing productivity throughout an organization.”

Other consortium members include:

• Alexandra Levit, columnist for the Wall Street Journal and writer for the New York Times
• Dr. Paul Root Wolpe, Professor of Bioethics at the Emory Center for Ethics.
• Manfred Leu, Head of Digital Workplace User Adoption and Consulting, and Director of IT at Swiss Re.

Discover all the experts who are part of the “Humanizing the Digital Workplace Consortium” in the official press release.

3. Team #CommunicationApps, do they really help to improve productivity at work? Take a look at the pros and cons to make up your mind. ow.ly/fIzr30hjzyM #Productivity #DigitalWorkplace

Our consumer habits continue to leak into the workplace. Mobile working is the clear example, with bring your own device (BYOD) policies continuing to thrive in businesses around the world. Taking this a step further, messaging apps from the consumer space (think Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) are being replicated in the workplace in the form of Slack and Microsoft Teams.

But can the enterprise versions replicate the benefits and popularity of their consumer-based counterparts? David Lavenda lists the pros and cons of team communication apps to decide whether they really work. Read the full LinkedIn article here.

4. Discover the latest features of #MicrosoftTeams reports, check this out and get started! ow.ly/citD30hlgnu #Office365 #SharePoint #CollaborativeWorking

Adoption of Microsoft Teams has gotten off to a great start. However, this means that many users are in need of some help getting to grips with the new software. A new user of Teams may not know where to begin, or understand how best to use the solution to improve productivity and collaboration. In these cases, the IT department may want to connect with these new users to provide them with useful information and training resources.

Microsoft has added two new usage reports for Microsoft Teams that help you understand how workers are using Teams to communicate and work together.

Find out more in this post on the Microsoft Tech Community.