A digital workplace enables productivity and organizational flexibility. Get tips on enhancing your digital workplace experience for both employees and customers!
It has officially been a year since countries around the world went into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. And while some companies were ready to support their suddenly-remote staffs, plenty more learned countless valuable lessons of how best to support collaboration and productivity in a digital-first space while keeping company assets safe.
As defined by Gartner, the “digital workplace” is one that enables new, more effective ways of working, raising employee engagement and agility in the process, and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies (from business applications like emails to enterprise social media tools). But going digital is easier said than done, which is why we’ve compiled a list of best practices to follow when you’re researching the best ways to support your digital workplace. Read on for our tips!
Perks of the Digital Workplace
Even prior to the pandemic, many businesses were building digital workplaces to help support a seamless and collaborative workplace that covered both physical and digital spaces. According to ISG, by bringing together applications, data, information, and collaboration tools tailored to an individual employee’s role, location, and tasks, employees become more productive while the organization attains more flexibility.
When building a digital workplace, IT organizations must consider how people, business processes, and technology work together to deliver a safe, consistent, and effective digital employee experience anywhere, anytime, and on any end-user device.
In contrast to traditional work environment models, the digital workplace instead considers and understands how to increase employees’ use of digital technologies to support optimal customer experiences and more efficiently do their own jobs. Creating a digital workplace strategy leads to higher revenues, the ability to attract and retain talent, and outperform the competition in a hyper-competitive and connected world.
10 Best Practices for Boosting Your Digital Workplace Experience
Digital workplaces – a huge facet of digital transformation – are not just about technology, but require organizations to both examine and functionally change the ways they work. As more businesses continue to refine their digital workplace model, CMS recommends the following best practices that will keep the user experience at the forefront:
1. Collaboration framework – collaboration is a huge part of getting work done – but how does teamwork translate to a digital space? By having defined tools and practices in place that dictate how employees contact one another, share information, document ideas, solve problems, and communicate decisions, organizations ensure that workflow remains effective and meets business needs.
2. Define a feedback loop – having a system in place that complicates employees’ jobs doesn’t solve anything. Therefore, organizations need to continuously gather feedback from workers to understand which workflow processes are working and which ones need to be tweaked.
3. Employ the right people – one of the basic tenets of success for the digital workplace depends on the people it staffs. Having people with a positive mindset who understand that all communication and collaborated must be executed digitally will allow them to work seamlessly across teams.
4. Create policies – to ensure the long-term of the business and the people who work there, policies need to be in place that dictate, for instance, conduct during meetings. When people can reference certain workflow and other policies, they’ll feel more empowered to get their tasks done independently.
5. Implement agile tools – every digital workplace relies upon agile tools that enable productivity and collaboration. With a people-first mindset, the right agile tools can be selected to help the job get done.
6. Use video conferencing – while emails, instant messaging platforms, and conference calls are great for getting aligned, they can also lead to further miscommunication. Thanks to visual cues provided by videoconferencing, coworkers around the globe can be connected and better understand one another.
7. Collaborative platforms – even in a physical office, it can be easy to lose track of all the materials needed for a specific project. Therefore, having a unified platform for all files and documents is crucial for productive teamwork. If they don’t have one in place already, organizations need to look into a cloud-based file storage platform to keep content in a secure, easily accessible central location.
8. Integrative workplace – some existing tools and systems workplaces need to integrate with include your CRM, human resources information system, enterprise resource planning, and other enterprise social apps. The right digital workplace platform will enhance these existing systems, remove data siloes, and eliminate the need for point applications that aren’t integrated into the broader workflow.
9. Artificial intelligence – AI features like chatbots are increasingly being built into businesses’ sales processes. Chatbots in particular enable 24/7 support and can be used to deliver more qualified leads to sales reps a bit further into the sales process by answering initial questions from new prospects and introducing them to the product or service.
10. Start using your data – your organization likely generates tons of data daily, but is anyone looking into that data for insights? With advanced technology like service desk analytics engines and performance analytics, dashboards, and machine learning, your digital workplace can help you gain meaningful analyses that lead to long-term strategic plans and improved real-time executive decision-making.
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Stefanini’s Solutions for Your Digital Workplace
As businesses across the world continue to recover from economic hardships enacted by COVID-19, companies’ resilience is being tested in ways never encountered before. One lesson the pandemic has taught us? Organizations need to build resiliency into their operations while adopting a digital workplace. That’s why leaders must act quickly to address immediate resilience issues as businesses shuffle through a range of new priorities and challenges, such as business continuity risks, workforce productivity, and security risks.
Is your organization prioritizing a digital workplace this year? You’re halfway there – your next step should be connecting with Stefanini to get access to the best tools and platforms that can support your digital workplace. Contact us today!
