Top 5 Best Digital Workplace Trends

Over the past couple of years, the digital workplace has become an increasingly core part of the workplace experience for many organisations.

When you’re considering whether to create or improve your organisation’s digital workplace, it’s worth understanding the benefits of a digital workplace strategy and asking the right questions.

For instance, why are digital workplaces so important? And what is the modern digital workplace business case?
To help you, let’s explore 5 digital workplace trends below:

1) The user experience is more important than ever

Since 2017, we have dedicated a lot of our blog space to the subject of a “personalised user experience”, and it’s a concept that has grown and will continue to grow.

Digital workplace guru Paul Miller writes that the employee experience [will] play a significant role in a powerful digital workplace, and it’s a feature that organisations will need to consider carefully to get right.

Providing users with an engaging employee experience is something we as intranet software providers have been prioritising for many years.

2) Artificial intelligence will play a key role in search

For all the science-fiction out there about how artificial intelligence will take over the world, the more understated reality is that it will help improve search.

Intranet search is one of the most important components of a digital workplace. Done well, intranet search allows users to find key information quickly so that they can focus on their everyday tasks; done badly, it can waste hours of work time. Utilising features of AI will make search so much smarter, with elements such as natural language, advanced algorithms, and predictive results expected to become standard.

3) Employee engagement continues to reign

Will there ever be a time where staff engagement isn’t important?

Employee experience is seen as the golden ticket for productive and happy staff and remains one of the top factors for measuring the success of digital workplace software.

Many digital transformation projects have created fragmented employee experiences that can make employees feel isolated or cause them frustration. Organisations should be shifting their emphasis to developing and implementing new technologies, enabling an inclusive and scalable digital environment which, in turn, provides an excellent experience for each employee.

And given that remote and hybrid work is so commonplace, adding “improving staff engagement for remote workforce” to the top of your business goals list will be more important than ever.

4) User analytics will get smarter

Measuring the success of an intranet, marketing campaign, new website, or anything that’s people-centric all rely on one key thing: user analytics. Without this vital data, there’s no way of determining if something was well-received or not.

The importance of user analytics within intranet software keeps growing year-on-year, as it’s a data-driven way of measuring if your intranet is being used.

Delving into the specifics, such as the readership of individual pieces of content, number of corporate policy views, and engagement levels with news articles will be made easy with smarter intranet user analytics. The more specific the data, the more informed intranet managers will be to make improvements to the modern workplace.

5) Gamification will spread into the entire intranet

Gamification has made waves in the e-learning industry, turning uninspiring training courses into interactive learning experiences. And now there’s demand for gamified features to appear across the whole intranet.

Intranet gamification will grow in popularity as it becomes clearer that it boosts and maintains user engagement. Fun features such as dynamic progress bars when filling in your user profile, “treasure hunts” that guide you around the intranet, and earning points for adding comments to news articles, will play a big part in increasing the intranet gamification trend.