A 9 step guide to improving the digital workplace experience

According to Gartner, the biggest competitive advantage for 30% of organizations will come from the ability to exploit digital technologies creatively. A smart move for companies today is to have upgraded IT systems, the best talent, and revised (if needed) business processes to lead the way for the digital transformation of any kind.

In the words of Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell, “A digital workplace is a business strategy to boost employee agility and engagement through the consumerization of the work environment.”

When organizations have engaged employees working with them, it leads to a 2.5 times high revenue than companies with comparatively low employee engagement. So, in order to retain top talent and achieve higher revenue, it is crucial to prioritize employee experience. 

In its ideal state, such a workplace helps increase productivity without operational compromises. Apart from computers, mobile devices, and productivity applications, a modern digital workplace creates a more immersive employee experience through chatbots, virtual assistants, and personal analytics. So, if you want to bring simplicity and intuitiveness to employees, improve their digital workplace experience by incorporating the following steps.

1. Establish a collaboration framework

Given that collaboration is the single most effective component of a digital workplace, it needs to be prioritized and well-planned out. A collaboration framework is essential to provide employees with tools that help them document ideas, share information, solve problems, have a discussion, and make decisions.

The most effective way is to define which tools are best suited for such collaboration and encourage their adoption through consistent use by the top management. Slack, Google Keep, Trello, Jira, and Asana are a few tools used by some of the organizations of all sizes, for their collaboration framework.

2. Prioritize collaborative content

For companies, organizing content is critical as keeping track of materials necessary for business operations and customer service can get overwhelming. Things get more challenging when multiple teams, large scale projects, and distributed initiatives are involved. 

Therefore, in order to create a truly digital workplace experience, companies must create a unified platform to store, update, and share documents to keep team collaboration and functions running smoothly. We advise a cloud-based file storage platform such as AWS or Google Cloud Platform.

3. Create a feedback loop

Almost every organization has some sort of feedback solution to get insights about a customers’ experience. Dedicated solutions like SurveyMonkey, Promoter and Hively might work great for customer feedback, but are an overkill for employee feedback.

Consider creating a feedback loop for internal teams because it encourages consistent, authentic communication and establishes positive feedback loops, which are essential to the success of any reciprocal relationship.  A feedback loop works better than a one-on-one performance evaluation because it takes away the pressure of providing objective guidance only from managers and instead spreads it uniformly across the organization. 

4. Adopt agile tools

Improving collaboration and boosting productivity is a lot easier when you have the right agile tools for your digital workplace. Today, there are several agile tools available that are designed purely to serve within a digital workplace. The choice of tools would heavily depend on the needs of the workforce. 

There are quite a few options but some prominent ones are Jira, Kanbanize, GitHub Project Management, and Monday.com. As important as it is to hold content at a central location, organizations can drastically improve the overall digital workplace experience by improving the efficiency of holding meetings using agile tools.

5. Employ talent with the right collaboration skills

A central point of digital workplace success is hiring people with the right skills and attitude. Employees with a positive attitude are important for any team but an additional requirement here is a mindset of using digital communications at all levels of collaboration. 

For this, companies will need to employ people with the collaboration skills or put in place training programs that enable them to communicate seamlessly in the digital workplace.  When employees know how to collaborate and cooperate with others, it increases workplace efficiency, helps in career advancement, and ensures they contribute to achieving organizational goals.

6. Make an effort to integrate

A digital workplace is not an isolated environment and therefore needs to co-exist with other systems within an organization. Companies need to create digital workplaces that integrate with existing CRMs, enterprise resource planning apps, human resources workplace systems, and other applications.

The integration at a personal productivity level as well as enterprise system level is necessary to remove applications that are not included in the broader workflow. The more integrated an organization’s digital workplace, the less are the chances of decision delays due to lack of information or clear communication. 

7. Set communication guidelines 

Instant messaging platforms, emails, and conference calls leave scope for miscommunication. Given the lack of visual cues, it is easy to misunderstand statements made, this is why it is beneficial for a digital workplace to hold important discussions over video conferencing.

Companies must also look to create and implement policies that enable collaborative communication between workers in different locations. For example, training employees to be sensitive to cultural nuances will make communication more easily acceptable. Set clear guidelines against behaviors such as muting one’s line, showing tardiness, or frequent connectivity issues, to ensure meetings go smoothly.

8. Artificial Intelligence

In 2022, it is almost impossible to find a digital workplace where AI (artificial intelligence) is not part of the overall infrastructure. AI has come a long way from being just a topic of academic research and has become a mainstream communication solution in the form of chatbots and virtual assistants.

The human touch in customer support still remains an important part, but chatbots offer a 24/7 communication option and substantially reduce waiting time. AI can help employees in the digital workplace get more qualified leads, automate initial questions from new prospects, and onboard new customers.

9. Training

The digital workplace introduces new technologies and it can be stressful for employees to adapt. With effective training, companies can make this transition more seamless for employees, especially given that reskilling is an important part of improving their experience in a digital workplace.

Many companies, especially technology companies have hired external digital consultancies to help employees learn new technical skills. Enabling continuous learning is important to ensure that employees are learning on the job.

Bottomline 

What we’ve talked about above is merely the blueprint of a digital workplace; its success lies in its execution. Talent500 is helping companies hire the right talent for digital workplaces. We connect you with an elite talent pool from across 50 countries. Start building teams for the digital workplace with us today, request a consultation today.