What makes a great digital workplace experience?
If you’re looking to implement or improve your digital workplace, this is an important question to be asking.
Digital workplace technologies have become essential as a result of increased remote and hybrid working. 85% of working adults want a hybrid approach of both in-office and home working in the future, according to data from the ONS. So the need for an effective digital workplace solution – one that aids productivity, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across dispersed teams – is absolutely vital.
A great digital workplace experience should be based on a combination of factors, including user requirements (i.e. what your teams need from the software), the look and feel of the system (i.e. its design and usability), and how it fits into your wider digital workplace transformation strategy.
Let’s take a closer look at these digital workplace experience components and see some examples in action!
Build a digital workplace experience based on your users’ requirements
Creating a requirements document is a key first step to implementing any new software, and the same applies to your digital workplace technology.
Requirements gathering means identifying your primary users, asking them what digital workplace services they need and why they need it, and using this data to inform your purchasing decision.
Fully understanding your users’ needs, rather than choosing a digital workplace based purely on a list of features, puts you on good footing to provide the best digital workplace experience to your staff.
This is what the teams at Dessercom did when they chose Claromentis as their digital workplace provider. Based on their teams’ day-to-day challenges, Dessercom were able to select a digital workplace solution that would address these head on and improve the employee experience.
For instance, with 80% of staff based on the road and outside of the office, it was important that these team members had quick and easy access to relevant information. Similarly, after a period of rapid growth, Dessercom were unable to modernise their processes at the same rate they were expanding, leaving teams overstretched and using outdated methods of working.
Having understood their teams’ challenges and what they needed to make work more productive, Dessercom had the data they needed to shortlist a selection of digital workplace platforms, ultimately choosing Claromentis.
Create an engaging digital workplace design
When all is said and done, you can’t provide a great digital workplace experience without an engaging design.
Why?
Because following good digital workplace design and usability principles will drive adoption rates, save time, increase efficiency, and improve the employee experience, all of which are essential to a successful digital workplace. So be on the lookout for a solution with an easy-to-use intranet CMS (content management system).
Not only does an engaging design positively impact the employee experience, it directly affects the customer experience too.
Indeed, digital workplaces aren’t just for internal teams. They can be used as external IT help desks, customer onboarding platforms, and talent management portals too, so your digital workplace design should accommodate these audiences.
This is how technology company Boost.ai approached their digital workplace strategies. They needed externally-accessible digital workplace training tools that could connect their delivery partners to learning development and onboarding materials. With multiple partners to onboard – including Accenture, Deloitte, and KPMG – Boost.ai created a unique design and digital workplace experience for each partner using Claromentis’ intranet design tools and intranet CMS.
As a result, each delivery partner could access a central and personalised portal that mirrored their branding, which increased retention.
Align the workplace experience with your digital workplace transformation strategy
The future of work is already here – perhaps sooner than we thought due to Covid-19 – thanks to the necessity (and increasing popularity) of remote and hybrid working. As a result, businesses that had yet to implement a digital transformation strategy needed to do so in record time.
Even without the disruption caused by the pandemic, organisations with global offices or dispersed teams quickly realised that digital transformation needed to happen sooner rather than later in order to keep remote staff connected and productive.
An example of this can be found in The AZSBDC Network’s journey to centralising their operations. After experiencing ongoing challenges while relying on email and file server storage, the AZSBDC Network realised that they were in need of an all-in-one digital workplace that closed the collaboration and communication gaps caused by using antiquated tech.
And by aligning the digital workplace experience with their digital transformation goals, they were able to do just that. Since streamlining their operations with digital workplace technologies, the teams at The AZSBDC have seen an improvement in their employee onboarding and learning development programmes, better collaboration thanks to easier access to important information, and quicker processing times for support requests.
