There isn’t a single platform that defines the digital workplace. While Office 365 may be a great way to bring the digital workplace technologies to your organization, it’s more helpful to think of the platform as a conduit for a variety of new interaction methods and collaboration.
Regardless of the specific technologies used, what makes a digital workplace successful depends on how the technology is adopted and how well it works for your specific business.
With this in mind, here are four characteristics of an effective digital workplace:
- Findability and interconnectivity: In an effective digital workplace, the use of metadata and content management systems gives you several different ways to uncover a piece of content (i.e. document, task, event, etc.) through several different methods. You’re able to find the content you need by either browsing through the structure of your collaboration environment or using enterprise search. The additional benefit of search is the automatic display of relevant content, marked with similar metadata, that you didn’t know existed.Getting to this level of information management is a challenge for organizations that are just starting to emerge from their data silos. These silos started becoming the norm in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a way to maintain compliance. The digital workplace represents a shift in that trend, as companies look to improve productivity through greater findability and interconnectivity.
- Collaboration and work flexibility: In the digital workplace, you have the ability to work anywhere with an internet connection — at home, in a different office or from the road — and still be just as effective. And that includes the ability to collaborate without traditional geographic or local network restrictions. Two people should be able to work on a document at the same time, reconciling changes and updates as they work toward a common goal.
- Communication: The digital workplace uses multifaceted communication to foster a sense of community. Regardless of your location, seamless communication tools allow you to share a sense of camaraderie and teamwork with coworkers in different locations and time zones. You might be using email and instant messaging to communicate, sharing updates on Yammer newsfeeds or instantly web-conferencing with your coworkers — whichever tools help you get together.Unified communications tools like Lync let you know who’s working and when, and provide a digital equivalent to walking over to someone’s desk and asking a question, so that collaborative projects don’t stall out waiting for team members to respond to email.
- Culture: A lot of companies realize that having a more transparent, interconnected and collaborative workplace is necessary for remaining competitive in the marketplace, but they’re struggling to build that culture.Creating an effective digital workplace culture doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes leadership with a willingness to change. The leadership’s motivations might be to improve information retention, compliance and auditing, which is fine. But when it comes to execution, it’s important to emphasize the importance of creating a collaborative and open culture to IT and business users.
The digital workplace isn’t just about new technology; it’s about ways of interacting and working together. With that said, people who simply don’t want to adjust to the changing technology are likely to have a difficult time adapting, because technology has become the conduit that facilitates the findability, collaboration, communication and culture that make up the digital workplace.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by contacting Withum.
