Digital Workplace

The Digital workplace is changing the way that organisations conduct business, providing them with operational support, employee profiling, transparency and collaboration abilities that we have not seen before. As an integral part of how an organisation operates day to day, the digital workplace should essentially serve five purposes:

• Decision Support

• Risk Mitigation

• Innovation and Knowledge Management

• Learning

• Employee Engagement and Loyalty

Decision Support

Organisational flux, rising competitive pressures and the expanding global reach of many organisations place a premium on information that helps executives to make the decisions required to manage a company. New demands for transparency from stakeholders and regulators magnify the need for better and more timely information.

The digital workplace needs to provide two kinds of decision support;

• pull support when executives actually go out and look for the information they need in order to make decisions; and

• push support where the information is pushed to the executive by way of creating awareness, or educating or as an early warning status which requires action.

Pull Support

Document management used to be the domain of the individual on his own C-drive (and prior to that in his filing cabinet), later documents were posted to share drives in whatever categorisation made most sense to the individual. Gradually project managers started imposing some structure through a Document and Records Management System or a document library in the cloud and people began using the shared information to inform their decision making.

Today’s business environment has become infinitely more complex and it has become necessary for people, not only to look for what they need based on how they expect the information to be categorised, but to be able to actively search using key words on the digital workplace.

It is possible to enable employees to surface the information they require to make decisions based on a search functionality as well as individual profiling. This means that if one employee is profiled as a “marketer” and another as a “technologist”, when they search for documents and type in the words “networking calendar February” the marketer will get the latest plan for a breakfast she organised for senior staff members to network with clients, and the techie will get a list of disruptions on the company network during the month of February.

Push Support

Push support is generally in the form of feeds which are set up in order to push the latest relevant information from outside the organisation is reaching the right executive. This may be economic data, market information, technology development, trends analysis etc.

Push support also includes aggregated information about the company in the form of regularly updated news portals or progress reports etc.

Risk Mitigation

In order to be fully equipped to make any decision it is clear that the executives and employees need to have the correct information at the correct time. Care must be taken with version control and other document management activities to ensure that this is the case.

Company policies are also incredibly important when it comes to risk mitigation and of course the documentation pertaining to governance must be easily findable and accessible on the digital workplace.

It is also important to build corporate governance into the operational processes on the digital workplace. For example, if certain people may not speak on behalf of the organisation, they should not be able to post on the corporate blog, some employees might need to be moderated and some actively encouraged to create thought leadership blogs etc.

Risk can also be mitigated by building flags into the digital workplace, for example when a senior engineer resigns, anyone who is working on a project with her is immediately notified and can proactively co-opt a new resource onto the project. Another example could be when a supplier has let the company down, that the system alerts the accounts manager that there may be a delay on delivery to the client.

Innovation and Knowledge Management

We all know that the pace of change is rapidly increasing and the digital workplace is a fabulous collaboration tool for different employees from different parts of the organisation to become aware of innovation projects and participating in innovating into the future.

Well-designed digital work environments let the employees attach all the related documentation to the innovation project, collaborative discussions and the profiles of the individual participants, so that in future this data can be interrogated to understand the innovation process or to identify people with great innovation skills. This is a great knowledge management tool.

Learning

The digital workplace can incorporate workflow which enables the employees to identify gaps in their knowledge and to book themselves on courses. It can provide on-line material and the succession plan can also be built into the individual’s profile as they learn and progress through the organisation.

Employee Engagement and Loyalty

The digital environment is a fantastic tool for connecting and communicating with employees, whether it is providing them with interesting content, providing information, announcements, rewarding them for contributions or enabling them to see how they are performing or just letting them network and up-skill each other within professional communities of interest. It is an important part of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and goes a long way to building employee loyalty and reducing attrition, especially with the physically disconnected, hybrid way we work these days.

Digital workplaces are capable on learning from the employees’ behaviour and gradually filter out the excess noise which will improve the work experience no end.

The ability to profile employees leads to all kinds of opportunities from improving their search experience, enabling people to find certain skills within the organisation.

The modern workplace is a critical strategic and operational tool which no medium to corporate business or public sector organisation should be without.