Over the last 10 years, new communication tools and social media have dramatically changed how people communicate and connect in their personal lives and in the workplace.
In today’s digital workplace, an employee should be able to work and collaborate from virtually any location, with a seamless experience whether they’re using a smartphone, tablet, laptop or other hybrid device.
One of the main challenges in the digital workplace is that consumer mobile apps have changed employee expectations for corporate workplace tools. People are used to communicating via text, instant messaging and social media, and spend hours a day on smartphones. It’s no longer enough to provide access to work email on a smartphone and call it a day.
This shift in expectations has given rise to a host of new workplace communication and enterprise social platforms, such as Microsoft Yammer. These take the basic functionality of consumer apps and social networks, and try to bring them into a secure intranet in a way that meets your organization’s specific business needs.
In addition to employee needs and expectations, the solutions you choose have to match the culture of your organization. In more traditional companies, for example, managing documents may be the main priority, and an enterprise intranet could be an effective way to share documents as well as company news and events.
Organizations with a more open workplace culture would likely benefit from a different set of digital collaboration tools. If your company culture is more open, it might be a good candidate for improving the employee experience via two-way social communications and sharing news and events over a corporate newsfeed function.
Getting Started
Here are five steps to get started with the digital workplace, helping to connect your employees via mobile devices and improve their experience:
1) Identify the most important user needs: Conduct workshops, survey users and talk to stakeholders in specific business areas to learn what work processes should be improved, and which would have the greatest impact and potential for benefit.
2) Clarify your compliance and security concerns: Early in the process, it’s good to understand any restrictions your organization faces in terms of digital workplace tools. For example, many consumer apps for document management aren’t secure enough for enterprise use. The key is to make sure there’s a secure and compliant way to reach your business goals.
3) Identify digital collaboration use cases: A survey is often a good way to begin identifying the use cases for workplace communication and online collaboration tools. The goal is to find one, two or three uses that would make a big difference to the organization, such as the ability to edit a document from a mobile device, or giving sales the tools to submit expenses from the road.
4) Prioritize use cases in order of impact: Once you have your use cases, start with the single change that offers the greatest improvement in terms of employee performance, efficiency, productivity and quality of the work.
5) Gradually introduce digital workplace capabilities: Don’t try to make too many changes at once. Instead, start with a pilot program, focusing on improving the employee experience in one department.
For example, if the sales force doesn’t currently have access to the latest collateral from their tablets and laptops, start by making this access possible, and then get feedback. Was it easy for sales reps to show the collateral to customers? Did it provide value? Once you’re satisfied with your pilot project, move on to the next project.
Mobile access to work email isn’t enough anymore. Providing your employees with additional workplace communication and collaboration solutions improves their experience and supports greater productivity.
