In the last few years we’ve seen massive shifts in workplace trends. There has been an influx of tech-savvy millennials, unprecedented growth of SaaS applications, increased remote workforce and rapid emergence of AI technologies. Several such trends have not only changed how work gets done but also posed unique challenges of their own.
The modern workplace is evolving rapidly, with distributed teams, brand-new business models, and complex security issues. The need for a powerful and connected digital workplace has never been more important to meet these evolving needs. Your basic digital tools like content management system, one-off communication and collaboration channels won’t cut it anymore.
AI and similar emerging technologies are facilitating the New Work Nucleus by transforming each and every aspect of the digital workplace. The crux of the digital workplace is hence being redesigned.
In this article, we’ll discuss some essential elements your digital workplace should have to match up to the expectations of the modern workforce.
Essential Elements Of A Digital Workplace
1. Strategy And Roadmap
While this may sound like a cliche, having the right digital workplace strategy and roadmap is still imperative. In order to generate maximum value out of the digital workplace, businesses must have clearly defined business and technology priorities. Understand the business value you want to achieve with a digital workplace transformation initiative. Analyze the digital workplace maturity of your organization and identify the appropriate tools for your digital workplace toolkit.
Perform extensive market research, analyze the impacts on specific processes and departments, and set up the governance and oversight processes to ensure compliance with the objectives.
2. Two-Way Communication
Today’s employees want their voices to be heard. And management should keep employees informed about various digital transformation and business initiatives. Your digital workplace platform should enable both top-down and bottom-up communication channels through features like Management Speak, Announcements, Idea Management, News, Polls etc.
3. Chatbots
A successful digital workspace must incorporate AI chatbots to improve employees’ access to information and documents from the company’s intranet, via mobile devices or laptops. Intranet chatbots also enable employees to perform HR and IT related activities such as sending leave requests, travel settlement requests, or IT requests, etc.
4. Smart Search
Information is only valuable if it can be found and accessed. And today’s enterprises are flooded with humongous amounts of information across disparate applications and databases. According to McKinsey, employees spend on average 9 hours per week on searching and collating information from multiple sources. Digital workplaces today need cognitive enterprise search which uses AI, machine learning and natural language processing to fetch documents and information from all your internal and external systems. It reduces the time to find the relevant information and improves employee productivity.
5. High Personalization
Platforms in the consumer world like Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, etc. deliver high user personalization. Employees who already use these platforms in their personal life expect the same level of personalization in the enterprise world as well.
Digital workplace platforms must have AI-driven personalization capabilities to deliver highly relevant information based on a user’s role, location, interests, preferences, activities etc. This drives employee engagement, productivity and experience.
6. Advanced Security Capabilities
A large number of remote workers access critical company data from new devices and often by using unprotected servers. Consequently, the threat frontier grows exponentially. Moreover, data security is further complicated by cloud computing, mobility and social media use, therefore, businesses need effective security solutions to protect their millions of dollars worth of data and intelligence from the ever-increasing cyber-attacks. This means that digital workplaces need to go beyond basic user authentication and selected access, and include additional safety features such as sophisticated firewall protection and high-caliber encryption, along with disaster recovery strategies to curb data theft.
7. Flexible Integrations
Businesses usually have multiple disparate digital systems – CMS, ERP, CRM, Office 365, enterprise search, analytics, and DAM, etc. This not only complicates the technology architecture but also poses significant integration challenges, especially in the case of legacy systems.
A digital workplace platform must be able to unify all your existing and future digital systems. Thereby you’ll be able to not only centralize the technology architecture but also increase enterprise-level flexibility as it enables businesses to scale up, or down, according to the changing business needs.
Get Started
The new age of working demands a fresh and modern approach to transforming the digital workplace. While new digital initiatives do present significant challenges, businesses that start today will acquire a clear competitive edge in the future.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, please feel free to get in touch with one of our digital workplace consultants for a personalized consultation. You might also be interested in exploring our autonomous digital workplace platform – Mesh 3.0 which is equipped with modern digital features like
- Cognitive enterprise search
- Intranet chatbots
- Mobile apps
- Personalizers
- Intuitive content creation tools
- Flexible integration
- AI-Powered knowledge mining
- Analytics and dashboards
