Demystifying the Digital Workplace
What does the word ‘Workplace’ mean? The word has different meanings, for the baby boomer generation it is the traditional office set-up – meeting rooms, office desks and office phones. For today’s generation, particularly the millennial, expected response would be centered around digital touch points, virtual personal assistants, tablets, SaaS based productivity tools, unified communication, chat, smartphones or instant messaging.
This article discusses how the digital workplace, along with consumerization of IT and new age technologies is changing the dynamics of today’s workplace.
Transforming the Workplace Digitally
Digital is prompting organizations across industries to reimagine their workplace strategies for better business success as the correlation between employee engagement and business performance is becoming increasingly relevant. Digital is playing a significant role in disrupting workplaces.
Today’s digital workplace is an always connected environment that enables faster and instant access to everything an employee needs. The digital workplace promotes employee collaboration, engagement and innovation through a consumer-like computing experience. Consumerization of IT and convergence of mobile technologies with social computing is changing the workplace dynamics. Proper planning, overall strategy, roadmap and execution are all linked to overall productivity and agility of the employees along with work engagement is required for a Digital Workplace.
Reimagining the Workplace with Digital
Generation Z, the demographic cohorts after the Millennials, are expected to enter the workforce in large numbers in the next few years. They, as consumers, expect personalized, user and persona based support solutions for their connected devices. To engage effectively with this demographic group, enterprises will need accelerate innovation and build a better workplace of tomorrow.
Here are the key trends that are driving the transition from the traditional workforce to a digital workforce:
Digital Dexterity
Digital dexterity is an organization’s ability to self-organize and adapt to evolving digital technologies in order to deliver more value to the customer. It is the level of adaptability to new technologies, evolving customer and market expectations, along with optimum resource allocation.
Digital Collaboration
Thanks to increasing consumerisation of IT technology and devices, an increasing number of digital workers are expecting the same ease of use with their work-related technology and tools, as any of their consumer related experiences (such as online shopping) in their personal lives.
Digital Innovation
The dynamic pace of the modern work environment means that employees must learn to adopt collaboration and productivity tools to get their work done easily and faster. The dependence on connected and collaboration devices has further accelerated the change, which is challenging for employers to meet the growing demands.
Device-Centric to a User-Centric Model
A revolution is occurring in today’s workplace. Personalization and consumerisation of employee engagement through digital has increasingly changed the way people work. With the continuous evolution of the workplace and employee expectations, businesses that do not adopt a digital workplace strategy, face the maximum risk with regards to employee engagement.
Digital Business Enablement
The digital workplace along with the supporting technology tools can transform information technology from a support-based function to a business-enabling function.
The digital workplace can provide the following business benefits through proper implementation:
Revenue Generation: Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Digital applications can enable sales and marketing professionals to find the right resources and identify product up-selling or cross-selling opportunities for their customers. The rise of digital analytics tools, which involves the analysis of business data, can be used to drive a continuous improvement of the online experience for customers
Productivity Improvements: Improved workplace tools can save employee time and improve productivity. The implementation of a comprehensive digital workplace strategy can enable knowledge workers in their daily tasks through collaboration, communication, connection, and delivery
Improve the Customer Experience (CX): The use of data analytics tools and customer insights is critical for an organization to track their customer’s digital footprints. Structured customer data can provide valuable information on the type of transacting customers, the categories of products purchased, and the market demand for a product line. The CX factor can be managed effectively using digital analytics
Employee Augmentation
The optimum use of digital technologies can augment the capabilities of employees, particularly in the retail sector. Some of the trends that are helping employees include:
Cognitive technologies – to observe and analyze human work, and delegate common or routine work to digital assistants
Physical technologies - including advanced robotic technologies, which are compact and suitable to be integrated in any human workflow environment
Collaborative technologies - including software tools that can improve how product developers can create new products
Conclusion
Workplace innovation is critical to any business success, and depends on the business integration of emerging technologies that are appearing in the market. Emerging innovations in digital product technology can be integrated into the organization’s workplace strategy, after assessment of their business value.
The digital workplace has added differentiating value to the highly-competitive market, which has experienced new needs including mobility, seamless integration across technology devices, and global collaboration. With the rise of cloud-based services, the digital workplace is poised to become the new normal for providing new digital services to the customers, which cannot be delivered through traditional delivery modes.
