What is a Digital Workplace, and why is it important?

A digital workplace is a set of software applications and tools employees use to complete tasks and activities. A digital workplace offers personalized, role-based services and collaboration tools to help employees do their best work – anywhere, anytime, using multiple devices.

A digital workplace brings a multitude of advantages to an organization. With a digital workplace, you can:

• Boost efficiency and productivity. Many routine or more sophisticated processes can be automated or use AI features to eliminate more costly, time-consuming manual work. Employees get their job done faster and with fewer errors.
  
  
• Improve information findability and quality. Having information and documents accessible in one place reduces the time and effort users spend searching for stuff. Management tools for projects and processes improve quality control and productivity. Digitized processes and information reduce errors while enhancing transparency and knowledge-sharing.
  
  
• Increase employee satisfaction, flexibility, and scalability. A digital workplace offers employees greater flexibility to work where and when they can be most productive. This will often boost employee satisfaction and retention. It also offers an organization increased flexibility to scale growth or adapt to unexpected business disruptions.
  
  
• Greater transparency and cohesion. When information is unified and more easily accessible, it creates “a single version of the truth.” Unnecessary misinterpretations and bad decisions based on inaccurate information can be prevented. Organizational cohesion will strengthen when everyone has access to the same information simultaneously.
  
  
• Attract talent. A digital workplace can help those employees who value work-life balance, hybrid or remote work model. Today's employees are well-versed in cloud computing, social media, and other online collaboration applications. Organizations must embrace modern digital workplace tools to acquire and retain employees to maintain a competitive edge.
  
  
• Reduce overhead. With a complete virtual, digital workplace, organizations can cut down on travel expenses, office rent, and other costs that come with the traditional office model.
  
  
• Improve the bottom line. A digital workplace business model leads to various cost savings. It also empowers an organization to improve processes, learning, innovation and development, sales, and time-to-market. As a result, overall profit performance can be improved.

A digital workplace essentially combines three key elements: technology, processes, and culture. The framework of the digital workplace must embrace all these elements. Here is a roadmap for creating a successful digital workplace could look like this:

The toolbox for building a successful digital workplace can be divided into eight categories:

• Productivity: Applications supporting employees to execute their tasks efficiently, such as desktop applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
  
  
• Business applications: Online or on-premises solutions like ERP, HR systems, Management Systems, and CRM.
  
  
• Communication: Applications enable management and employees to publish, distribute and share information like an intranet, email, blogs, and information-specific portals.
  
  
• Collaboration: Solutions supporting efficient internal collaborations that are easy to manage and collaborate on and share information, plans, and files. These solutions include communities, team and collaboration areas, online meetings, wikis, and enterprise social media apps.
  
  
• Messaging: Applications providing rapid communication like chat/instant messaging platforms, mobile messaging, and micro-blogging.
  
  
• Connectivity: Solutions that help employees quickly find and contact experts and colleagues across the organization, such as employee directories, personal profiles, and organization charts.
  
  
• Knowledge & Innovation: Solutions enabling the organization to gather and share knowledge and to pull feedback and ideas from the employees to drive improvements and innovation, such as knowledge bases and communities, FAQs, polling, and survey applications.
  
  
• Mobility: Tools and applications enabling the employees to work anywhere, like tablets, smartphones, laptops, remote scanners, VPN networks, responsive intranets, and intranets accessible via native mobile apps, etc.

Digital transformation in the workplace is defined as the integration of digital technology into practically all areas of an organization's processes, fundamentally impacting operations and how value is created. Digital transformation is also a matter of cultural change as it requires organizations to transform their ways of thinking and working. It also challenges old habits and long-standing business processes and explores new practices, ideas and innovations.

A relatively new acronym in the HR and IT people’s jargon is “DEX.” It’s short for Digital Employee Experience, which describes an employer’s technology's impact on the employee. If, for instance, the IT environment is perceived as challenging to navigate, cluttered with hard-to-use tools, offers poor search options, and is supported by an invisible IT team, chances are your DEX is not great. However, the DEX index is probably very high if the employees feel comfortable with the tools provided, can easily find any information or other resources, and rarely have any problems with the technology.

By measuring your organization’s DEX index over time and taking action to improve it, you will see a rise in productivity, collaboration, engagement, employee satisfaction and retention.

The development of a digital workplace is never complete. When you have implemented a new or modernized digital workplace, you can’t put your feet up. You have only moved on to the next phase, governance and continuous improvement.

Continuous improvement is vital for a sustainable and prosperous digital workplace. Create governance policies and establish and follow up on performance metrics aligned with your digital workplace strategy. Conduct regular employee surveys and set up automated reports on user behaviour to understand their adoption and what can be improved. Ensure that staff responsible for governance have representation from all parts of the organization to cover all aspects of the user experience.