What is a Digital Workplace and how does it work?

A digital workplace is a set of applications and tools that employees can use to get their activities and tasks done. The Digital Workplace experience provides personalized, role-based services as well as the applications and collaboration tools required for employees to work on any device from anywhere. To achieve this, digital workplaces utilize mobility services and digital technology to help increase employee engagement.

Digital transformation in the workplace is defined as the integration of digital technology into practically all areas of an organization’s or business’ processes, fundamentally changing its 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, challenge old habits and long-standing business processes and explore new practices, ideas and innovations.

There’s an endless list of reasons why an organization or company should invest in a modern digital workplace. For starters, if you want to attract the best talents you simply have to. All over the world, people are getting used to working in modern digital and online environments. In the aftermath of the pandemic many knowledge workers today expect a certain degree of digitalization and reject jobs not offering a flexible and hybrid work model.

Secondly, a digital workplace will most certainly boost your organization’s flexibility, efficiency, productivity, agility, transparency, innovation, and overall performance. Processes will be executed more efficiently and to a large extent automatically; communications and collaborations will run smoother; employees will spend less time searching for information, conversations, and tools and more time on improving operations; internal and external relationships will be strengthened and costs typically attributed to the traditional workplace, such as office rent, travel expenses, etc., can be cut.

A company without a digital workplace would be like a car without its wheels. It wouldn’t get anywhere. In this modern world, practically every company, organization, consumer, supplier, bank and other financial institution use digital and online applications to do business, fix problems, communicate, collaborate and execute business processes. A digital workplace in its simplest form constitutes of just email and perhaps some calendar, meeting, communication, and collaboration applications. All of these are necessary to conduct business in a digitalized and connected world.

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

• Boost efficiency and productivity. Employees get their job done faster and with fewer errors. Deploying automation and AI techniques many routine-based and even more sophisticated processes can be automated, thus eliminating costs and time-consuming manual work.
  
  
• Improve findability and quality. Having all information and documents accessible in one place and through search engines, desktop, collaboration, and other digital applications reduces the time and effort users spend searching for stuff. With proper management tools for projects, case and process control the quality of the organization’s performance will improve. The quality of processes, products, and services will also benefit from a higher degree of digitalization as it leaves less room for errors, detects deviations faster, and boosts innovation due to enhanced transparency and knowledge-sharing.
  
  
• Increase employee satisfaction, flexibility, and scalability. A digital workplace enhances the employees’ flexibility to better balance their lives by being able to work where and when it suits them best. This tends to boost employee satisfaction and retention. It also offers the company and organization increased flexibility and scalability to grow and seize new business opportunities or adapt to unexpected business disruptions.
  
  
• Enhance transparency and cohesion. Gathering all communication, information, documents, media files, tools and other resources in one place makes it easier for the employees to access and find anything they need to execute their work tasks. If the information is accessible to everyone, this will create “one single version of the truth”, which will reinforce the information’s reliability and trustworthiness. Consequently, unnecessary misinterpretations, fake news, and bad decisions based on inaccurate information will be prevented. And when everyone gets access to the same information simultaneously and can discuss matters easily via, for instance, a social media tool like Yammer, organizational cohesion will strengthen.
  
  
• Attract digital talents. A digital workplace is simply a hygiene factor for people who value work-life balance and has a hybrid or remote work model as a prerequisite for even considering a job. These potential talents are often well-versed in cloud computing, social media, and other modern communications and online collaboration applications. If you want them on board you have to accommodate their needs.
  
  
• Reduce overhead. With a complete virtual workplace, you can cut down on travel expenses, office rent, and other costs that come with an office.
  
  
• Boost bottom line. A digital workplace and business model leads to various cost savings and empowers the organization to accelerate processes, learning, innovation and development, sales, and time-to-market. As a result, overall performance will improve, boosting profits.

The key to a successful digital workplace lies in the effective implementation of a digital workplace strategy that drives true cultural change. It’s the culture that ultimately determines to what extent the employees will make use of the digital workplace and how it will improve organizational performance. In order to develop a digital workplace strategy that leads to success you must first find out how the employees would prefer to work. It is pointless trying to implement a strategy that looks good on paper, fits the bill, or incorporates the latest technology. Start by talking to the organization and draw up your strategy thereafter.

A digital workplace strategy should cover four areas:

• Employees. This is what it’s all about – to build a digital environment that helps the employees to work more efficiently and to communicate, collaborate, learn, grow and connect better and with less effort. The goal is to enhance employee experience, forge relationships across organizational and geographical borders and enable synergetic knowledge-sharing.
  
  
• Technology. Obviously, technology is the enabler of the digital workplace. Most organizations already have a digital toolbox in place that includes various applications such as email, desktop applications, etc. This toolbox must include all the technology needed to support the business plan and the ways of working that a thorough investigation of employee needs and preferences will arrive at.
  
  
• Controls. This is about the governance structures and management processes needed to keep the digital workplace updated, robust, secure, and healthy. The flow of information must also comply with your organization’s policies and industry regulations.
  
  
• Goals. As with any big investment, it’s essential to have a clear vision of the final destination. Otherwise, you might invest in a new platform and applications that don’t drive improvements as expected. Your digital workplace vision must align with your business objectives and the organization's needs and preferences. Talk to the employees and do the homework before you start outlining the framework of the digital workplace.

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 and PowerPoint, etc.
  
  
• Business applications: Online or on-premises solutions like ERP, HR systems, Management Systems, and CRM.
  
  
• Communication: Applications enabling both 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 to collaborate on and share information, plans, and files with. 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 entire 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 in order 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.

When building a digital workplace it’s crucial to understand that it’s so much more than just technology. It’s basically a combination of three key elements: technology; physical space (office, home, hotels, coffee shops, shared office, etc.), and culture. The framework of the digital workplace must embrace all these elements. If you build a solution that doesn’t take into account that half the workforce is on the road most of the time it’s very likely the investment will fail.

As mentioned in the question “What is a digital workplace strategy?” above, the organization’s culture will determine to what extent the employees will make use of the digital workplace and how it will improve organizational performance. With that in mind, a roadmap for creating a successful digital workplace could look like this:

1. Find out your current state, needs, and preferences. Identify the organization’s current processes, tools, and ways of working and find out how they would prefer to work in order to choose the right solution for your digital workplace.
   
   
2. Involve all parts of the organization in the building process. Source the digital workplace team from all corners of the organization and with the right internal and external key stakeholders. Remember it’s not “just about IT”! HR is probably your most important ally in this project. Another key element in a successful digital workplace is how it supports the employees in their daily contact with customers, suppliers, and other external parties.
   
   
3. Create a strategy aligned with your vision and goals. Build a strategy with clearly defined objectives in line with your organization’s needs and preferences. Be explicit as to how the digital workplace initiative will deliver business value, like increased productivity, efficiency, customer and employee satisfaction, etc.
   
   
4. Choose the right platform and tools. Implement a platform and tools which will deliver a unified user experience, strengthen organizational cohesion, and meet your goals and needs.
   
   
5. Find a catalyst for change and implement change management. It’s always hard for people to change their way of working and to adopt new technologies. But if the reward is attractive enough they will do the work. Try to find out what would speed up the change process, which pain-relievers the new digital workplace has in store for them, and tell them how to get it. Surveys, workshops, education programs, and information campaigns will set the wheels in motion.
   
   
6. Create a process for continuous improvement. Establish and follow up on performance metrics aligned with your digital workplace strategy. Conduct regular employee surveys and set up automated reports on user behavior to get a good understanding of their adoption of the digital workplace and how it can be improved. This is a project that never ends. Continuous improvement is vital for a healthy and successful digital workplace.

There’s a relatively new acronym in the HR and IT people’s jargon: “DEX”. It’s short for Digital Employee Experience and describes the impact an employer’s technology has on the employee. If, for instance, the IT environment is perceived as difficult 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, if the employees feel comfortable with the tools provided, can easily find any item of information or other resources, and rarely have any problems with the technology the DEX index is probably very high.

So why is knowing the DEX important? Well, if your digital workplace initiative isn’t delivering the results you expected your DEX surveys will most likely provide you with the answers you’re looking for. By focusing on your organization’s DEX index and taking appropriate measures to improve it you will see a rise in productivity, collaboration results, engagement, and employee satisfaction and retention. All of which lead to increased profitability.

There are lots of reasons why a company or an organization should build a modern digital workplace. The number one reason is that you don’t really have a choice since practically every business, municipality, government authority and other types of organizations have a digital platform for communication, collaboration and business exchange. Other than that a digital workplace gives you, for example, the power to:

1. Boost efficiency and productivity. Employees get their job done faster and with less errors. Deploying automation and AI techniques many routine-based and even more sophisticated processes can be automated, thus eliminating costs and time-consuming manual work.
   
   
2. Improve findability and quality. Having all information and documents accessible in one place and through search engines, desktop, collaboration and other digital applications reduces the time and effort users spend searching for stuff. With proper management tools for project, case and process control the quality of the organization’s performance will improve. The quality of the processes, products and services will also benefit from a higher degree of digitalization as it leaves less room for errors, detects deviations faster and boosts innovation due to enhanced transparency and knowledge-sharing.
   
   
3. Increase employee satisfaction, flexibility and scalability. A digital workplace enhances the employees’ flexibility to better balance their lives by being able to work where and when it suits them best. This tends to boost employee satisfaction and retention. It also offers the company and organization increased flexibility and scalability to grow and seize new business opportunities or adapt to unexpected business disruptions.
   
   
4. Enhance transparency and cohesion. Gathering all communication, information, documents, media files, tools and other resources in one place makes it easier for the employees to access and find anything they need to execute their work tasks. If the information is accessible to everyone, this will create “one single version of the truth”, which will reinforce the information’s reliability and trustworthiness. Consequently, unnecessary misinterpretations, fake news and bad decisions based on inaccurate information will be prevented. And when everyone gets access to the same information simultaneously and can discuss matters easily via, for instance, a social media tool like Jammer, the organizational cohesion will strengthen.
   
   
5. Boost the bottom line. A digital workplace and business model leads to various cost savings and empowers the organization to accelerate processes, learning, innovation and development, sales and time-to-market. As a result overall performance will improve, boosting profits.

The challenges encountered when implementing a digital workplace vary from one company or organization to the other. It depends on the industry and line of work, the size of the organization and if it stretches beyond national borders and on its culture. Some of the most common challenges are:

• Resistance to change. Nobody wants to change the tools they use and their way of working if they’re comfortable with it. Especially if it means getting things done in a slower pace, while learning, and spending days in training programs. It’s important that business leaders foster a new culture for change and show employees how the digital workplace, with its smart tools, can help them solve everyday tasks more efficiently.
  
  
• Digital skill gaps. If the employees don’t know how to take full advantage of all the new tools expected results will fail. Adequate training on employee terms is critical to the success of the digital workplace.
• Migration from legacy systems. Many organizations find it difficult to completely ditch their former legacy systems and other tools the users are accustomed to as they migrate to the new digital workplace. Some try to implement the new platform without changing their existing systems and processes. This will cause confusion and most likely create multiple data silos. If you can’t let go of some of your old systems make sure to only integrate those which are not backed by new applications in the digital workplace.
  
  
• Security. Implementing a new or modernized digital workplace often means moving more data into the cloud so that it’s easier for the users to access information, and to work from anywhere and on any device. As a result, data security becomes an extremely important building block in the formation of the digital workplace. The best and easiest way to overcome this rather big challenge is to implement a standardized platform which comes equipped with all the necessary security functions, guidelines and processes.
  
  
• Information overflow and poor findability. A digital workplace has the annoying habit of swelling over time. More information, documents and files are constantly added and with a plethora of communication, collaboration and messaging applications the amount of information, notifications and conversations might be overwhelming.
  
  The bigger the mass, the more likely it is that employees miss out on important news and information, and that they become digitally exhausted which will have a negative impact on productivity. To avoid this counter-productive amassing of information, you need to establish strict lean routines for every aspect of information management, from the posting of new information to the deletion and archiving processes. Also, think twice before introducing yet another collaboration, enterprise social media or messaging application.
  
  Ensuring that search functions maintain high performance and functionality is also of utmost importance to increase the popularity of the digital workplace and employee efficiency and productivity. Poor findability is one of the biggest obstacles to a successful digital workplace.
  
  
• Organizational silos. One of the digital workplace’s most liberating forces is the ability to unite and bring the organization closer together. When everyone gets access to the same information simultaneously and can communicate and collaborate easily with anyone the organizational cohesion will strengthen. But to make this happen organizational silos must be removed. They make an organization resistant to change and impedes employees and units to communicate and collaborate efficiently.

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, which is governance and continuous improvement.

The development of a digital workplace is never complete. Continuous improvement is vital for a healthy, sustainable and successful digital workplace. Therefore, you have to create governance policies and establish and follow up on performance metrics aligned with your digital workplace strategy. As part of this work you should conduct regular employee surveys and set up automated reports on user behavior to get a good understanding of their adoption of the digital workplace and how it can be improved. It’s also wise to staff up a governance and improvement team with key stakeholders from all parts of the organization, so that every aspect on the users’ behaviors and needs is covered.

Precio Fishbone helps companies and organizations all around the world to create, upgrade and modernize their digital workplaces. With our award-winning intranet platform Omnia we can deliver a complete solution for internal information, communication and collaboration. And with its powerful integration capabilities you can smoothly integrate both internal and external applications, providing the employees a unified digital workplace experience. Read our customers’ best-in-class intranet and digital workplace examples to get inspiration for your digital workplace initiative.

Precio Fishbone’s award-winning intranet platform Omnia delivers leading performance and an intuitive, personalized and task-oriented user experience on all devices. Its fully featured intranet capabilities cater for both simple and complex publishing scenarios and ensure that content is constantly fresh and accurate and that users stay updated. It provides tools for targeted internal communication, streamlined collaboration and advanced search, all of which reduce the time users spend searching for information and help them collaborate and execute their work more efficiently. The platform also includes functionality and support for Document and Quality Management Systems, coupled with a process visualization tool (Process Viewer).

Omnia’s rich social features, like its smart templates and wizards for creating communities, can support an organization in strengthening its workplace cohesion and boosting knowledge-sharing and employee engagement. Omnia’s integration capabilities also enable smooth integration with internal and external applications, providing the users a unified digital workplace experience.

With Omnia a company or an organization can consolidate and integrate its entire information archive, documents, processes, collaborations and tools in one place. This will make any item of information or other internal resource accessible via a single entry point and provide the organization a “single version of the truth”. All in all, this will boost productivity, engagement and the organization’s ability to create a better future for itself. The platform also provides unique capabilities for future adaptation and development, backed by Omnia’s support as your needs evolve.

A digital workplace is basically a virtualized form of the traditional physical workplace, in which people execute their work tasks, and communicate and collaborate through a combination of digital, network and cloud applications.