A digital workplace no one wants to leave

The most popular workplaces are the ones where the employees feel included, respected and appreciated, and where there’s room for personal development. Having an environment, tools and processes that are adapted for them to thrive and be able to work efficiently is almost as important. There is no difference between the physical and the digital workplace in this respect. Here we provide some tips and advice on how to create a digital workplace where everyone wants to hang out.

In a way, it’s actually easier to fulfill the job satisfaction factors in the digital workplace. This is because you can create clear structures, customized tools and automated processes that address the needs and wishes of employees.

If the intranet constitutes or is used as an entry point to the entire digital workplace, it’s relatively easy to create an inclusive, easy-to-manage and personally adapted workplace.

Some of the most important measures are to:

Build in structures for transparency, community, and feedback. The feeling of belonging and of being appreciated, the power to influence, and the potential for personal development are essential factors for most people to enjoy their work. One of the advantages of an intranet is that transparency, which is an important piece of the community puzzle, comes naturally. Gone are the days when employees missed out on important information just because they were away from the office. But it doesn't happen automatically. It’s important to think through which information is for everyone and which should be targeted (read about targeting below). To create structures that increase the organization’s cohesion and engagement through, for example, participation and feedback, you can read the blog post Empowering employees via the intranet.
Optimize search and navigation to make it easy to find news, documents, tools, people, projects, processes, and information about your employment. Make a clear and comprehensible mega menu on the start page, use page menus and breadcrumbs, and put a lot of effort into configuring a good search functionality. Being able to categorize and filter the search are some basic functions that the search function should have. With Omnia, Optimizely (Episerver), and similar intranet and CMS platforms, this type of custom and advanced search functionality is included.
Create a personal and task-oriented user experience so that the users can quickly access their tasks, collaborations, files, etc., and feel that the content is relevant to them. To achieve this, the users' profiles must be made as detailed and complete as possible. This enables you to direct news, files, and other type of content to the right recipient (targeting).

With the help of rich user profiles, the home page can also be personalized with articles, projects, collaboration groups, tools, files, and services aimed at the user. With the same logic as mobile phone notifications, Omnia offers user-customized notifications via a notification panel, as well as assigned tasks and documents (which are flagged when changed) via the same panel.
Help the users help themselves. As a user of the intranet and the entire digital workplace, you don't want to have to contact IT support all through your working day. It should be easy to find out how tools work and how tasks are to be solved. Be generous with templates, step-by-step guides, videos, FAQs, wikis, and knowledge bases where employees can share knowledge and help each other. This applies to everything from showing how to submit a sick note to technical instructions about a particular software. For example, by using templates, you can make it very easy for the users to create certain documents and new collaborations. Read more >>
Set up virtual coffee rooms. In hybrid-based and completely virtual workplaces, it’s good to create informal meeting spaces online. During the pandemic, it became clear to most organizations how important it is for cohesion and engagement that employees connect and socialize informally. The phenomenon of virtual coffee became a widespread concept and a solution to social malnutrition for many organizations. This may not be the right solution for everyone. Still, if your organization is geographically dispersed or you don't have a physical office, this should be something for you to consider.