A Successful Digital Workplace Experience

Creating a positive digital workplace and employee experience is crucial for business success and productivity. In fact, all forward-thinking executives and corporate leaders know that the success of any business hinges on the people who work for the company and interact with customers.

Finding the right recipe for innovation and growth requires a strong mix of strategy, culture, operational insights, digital capabilities, and engagement. While technology is an important binding agent the critical ingredient is people – digital transformation first starts with employees.

Improving the digital workplace & employee experience

Here are five key ingredients to help you create a culture of empowerment and action, foster innovation and creativity, improve employee happiness and productivity, and elevate employee experience as a strategic game-changer.

#1 Cultivate Culture and Leadership

Employees want more than just a job, they want a sense of belonging and purpose. Meaningful work is the number one driver of engagement for employees. Increase the quality and frequency of “purposeful” dialog.

Connect with Leaders – Executive voices matter and are key to building trust and demonstrating a real commitment to the mission and company values.
Praise your Colleague – The ability to recognize performance at both the team and peer-to-peer level further reinforces the meaningful impact of work.
Champion Ideas – Encouraging teams to innovate and share their ideas more openly brings people together and shows how you value creativity.

#2 Offer Personalized Productivity

Segmentation plays a large role in today’s leading customer experiences. Employees want the same relevant and frictionless experiences in the workplace. Personalize the digital workplace to reduce noisy distractions and improve productivity by:

Optimize the journey to enhance the digital workplace experience with personal touches and timely content. Invest in tools that improve employee satisfaction and retention.
Embedding activity streams and integrating a modern and user-friendly experience with enterprise integrations allows employees to focus on activities and conversations that matter without “context switching.”
Utilizing people & profiles to enable employees to find and build on the work of others with dynamic search and discovery features powered by the social graph.

#3 Use Digital Storytelling

The consumer-like behaviors, habits, and tools that people use to communicate in their personal lives are migrating to the workplace. Employees expect more transparency and they want the ability to freely share and publish content. People have become accustomed to benefiting from comments on a discussion thread that our eyes are now trained to gravitate towards trending “posts”.

Improve digital workplace experience and employee engagement with:

Humanized communication by making your content shorter, more social, and “snackable” with embedded tags, images, graphics and videos.
Targeted news so you can deliver the right content to the right audience and letting your employees choose which channels and topics they want to follow.
Modern publishing to simplify the content creation, approval and editorial pipeline of corporate news and information.

#4 Empower Employees with Self-Service Knowledge

Some of the biggest drains on employee productivity and engagement come from a lack of available knowledge. Whether you have an IT, HR, or customer service question, having to search multiple places or contact other employees wastes valuable time and effort. Employees increasingly want to solve their own problems, yet many still can’t perform simple actions within their digital workplace. Empower all workers with easier access to knowledge and tools with:

Digital assistants to reduce service costs and efforts by deflecting questions from high-cost channels to self-service chatbots and agents.
Intelligent workflows to connect and automate the different business apps that employees are using to help speed up daily routines and improve productivity.
Feedback tools that tap into data from employee activities for new AI-driven insights with pulse surveys, polls and feedback forms that capture the heartbeat of your employee experience.

#5 Provide a Solution with Consumer-grade Design

In today’s busy world, providing your employees with a modern user-friendly experience can make or break your Intranet. To get the most out of your digital workplace create a unified solution that is simple and easy to use by leveraging:

Adaptive cards. A simple open card format that enables more consistent ways to display rich and interactive data.
Mobile-first rule. Start the product design from the mobile perspective, then expand to desktop experience and more advanced features.
Flat information architecture structures. Don’t get trapped by traditional hierarchies. When individual sites function as nodes, administrators can freely connect them into your ever-changing organizational structure.

While there may be other important factors to consider when crafting your specific digital workplace solution, this recipe is guaranteed to ignite your organization with a more personal and connected employee experience that fuels digital transformation, just be sure to measure the success.