Digital workplace is now driving a wide range of projects across many industries, the concept is still emerging. There are many definitions of the digital workplace and some are all encompassing, while others focus on specific facets of the concept. The digital workplace can be considered the natural evolution of the workplace. It encompasses all the technologies staff use to do their jobs. This can range from the HR applications and core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging, enterprise social media tools, intranets and portals.
The digital workplace provides an organization with services or capabilities across five main dimensions:
- Communication and employee engagement
- Collaboration
- Finding and sharing of information and knowledge
- Business applications (process specific tools such as CRM, ERP and CAD tools, plus employee self-service)
- Agile working — the ability to be productive any time and place
Why we need to adopt digital workplace?
A digital workplace is important because it lowers the dependence on a physical work location. This physical freedom of work can provide important changes to how people work, but also how teams are formed and how peers can come together in solving any ad-hoc issues.
- Attracting talent. 64% of employees would choose a lower paying job if they could work away from the office
- Employee productivity. Organizations with strong online social networks are 7% more productive compared to organizations without
- Employee satisfaction. Organizations that rolled out and installed social media tools internally found that there was a 20% increase in employee satisfaction.
- Retention of employees. When employee engagement goes up, there is a corresponding increase in employee retention of up to 78%.
- Communication and collaboration tools. Present day workers prefer newer communication and collaboration tools specifically instant messaging as compared to “traditional” tools like e-mail.
The widespread use of digital technologies is evident in every organization. Present day companies are made up of multi generational workforce. At the same time, a new generation of employees is entering the workforce and with the help of different technologies increased engagement, productivity and efficiency can be achieved.
Digital Workplace Drivers
Changes in our consumer lives has been a significant driver in helping organizations visualize what a better Digital Workplace might look like, and in turn raising employee expectations of what good looks like. But going further, a common theme in the most successful digital workplaces I’ve experienced is that there is a direct focus on the quality of the employee experience as the outcome that matters to leaders, much as companies now focus directly on customer experience as a priority.
The best companies are making improvements not to cut costs or boost productivity but because they want to be an attractive employer and a good place to work. This is what they measure over and above ROI (and in fact, savings and productivity often happen as a result of this anyhow).
The next frontier for digital workplace success will be getting digital literacy higher up the agenda. We need to stop talking about change management and adoption as steps in a project and think about how we equip and educate our people as citizens of our digital workplaces.
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