October | 2021
In the ever-competitive war for talent, digital workplace savvy companies are winning the war in attracting and retaining talent. The workplaces of today are altering every aspect of business operations and performance. As the distinction between the employees’ professional and personal life dissolves, the workplace of today demands unprecedented digital ways of communication, collaboration, and support.
The industry today acknowledges digital workplace experience as a key to innovation; implying that organizations that have fully implemented technologies like the smart workplace, mobility, automation, artificial intelligence, analytics, and connected employee tools are leading business transformation journeys.
The speed of adopting a digital workplace has never been so fast paced. The corporate world has started measuring the CxOs workplace on digital maturity. This contemporary approach is maturing rapidly as generation Y workers are moving into leadership and decision-making roles, and they tend to be almost fully digital and focused on driving adoption.
With this profound change, the CIO organization is looked upon as a business partner to enable rapid progress. Today, IT organizations are taking all possible initiatives to create the workplace for tomorrow. So, the real question is, though all of the technologies we talk about are already here – albeit still in uncommon usage, what is the successful transition to a digital workplace and how can we better deliver innovation in the working environment?
What is digital workplace experience?
Before we jump to a conclusive definition, it is essential to understand the meaning of the personal digital experience. Let’s answer this question: what do Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix have in common? The simple answer is a ‘consistent and intuitive personalized experience’ that is accessible anytime and anywhere and using any device.
The digital workplace experience is the spectrum of technology touchpoints for work that is based on the employees’ individual persona and removes the barriers of collaboration with the organization. These technologies are designed and delivered in a coherent way that is mobile, smart, instant, and intuitive.
Why adopt a digital workplace strategy?
Experience today is more important than the technology, and the gap between the organization and the personal digital environments can hinder the organization's ability to succeed. There is an immediate need to evolve the current workplace from a technology-centric approach to a user-centric approach. IT and HR leaders focused on the digital workplace should together strengthen the technology planning, as a poor employee experience fuels employee disengagement and dissatisfaction, in turn limiting their interactions with customers and the internal organization.
How to design the ideal digital workplace roadmap?
The employee is the new customer. Organizations are formally adopting strategies which have leadership support, aligned with expert execution through change management specialists, to design their modern workplace services. Let’s look at a few examples of how organizations have invested in technology to create a modernized workplace.
The path for implementing a digital workplace starts with taking a user-centric approach of studying employee technology, human needs, and the use cases for business. This design-led approach is a specialized study to understand what matters to people and business. The study is performed by a group of craftsmen specialized in design, strategy, technology, and marketing. They work closely with corporate employees to plan, write and produce the most needed and best-fit technology and non-technology solutions.
Personas are an excellent tool for the understanding of who your employees are and what they really want from the organization. With personas, it becomes quickly apparent that the digital workplace is not an out-of-the-box, one-type-fits-all product that can be implemented in any organization. Instead, it is an interwoven set of tools and applications published as per the users’ needs. Persona journey maps give great insights into different groups of employees, their motivations, digital needs, business requirements, and what they need from the organization to perform better.
The employee digital experience score card recently made its debut in the workplace technology environment. These smart tools can immediately extract valuable actionable insights from any device, process or software used by the employee. The metrics that matter most to the business are the ones that measure the intelligence of IT, and the ones that increase the speed and agility of understanding the business and employee needs. Machine algorithms and cognitive platforms are allowing us to proactively fix issues even before the users report them.
One of the hallmarks of employee experience design is the creation of an enterprise-level marketplace that delivers personalized software, tools, and content across the arc of the employee journey. The key here is integrating the backend systems and processes for service rendering automation. The touchpoints of these catalogs are persona-based, and the services can include everything from virtual machine images, mobility, facility, or the HR services.
Mobile apps are central to the omni-channel experience. Organizations are now embracing IoT and location-based services and applications to improve workforce engagement and experience. From smart workplace to smart parking and smart conference rooms, the future of the workplace will be defined by the seamless connections of networks, sensors, and mobile apps that will overcome all physical barriers.
Tech-enabled smart pre-boarding is a new way to impress employees. Onboarding service catalogs and VDI route new hires to an online pre-boarding process that includes payroll, compliance, policies, benefits, etc. Today, corporations based on personas give options to employees to choose their own devices and accessories during the pre-boarding process. Organizations believe effective onboarding sets the tone for a great employee experience and forms a critical component for new talent attraction.
AI and cognitive platforms are playing a key role in transforming the modern workplace. The chatbot performs far more complex tasks and instantly provides employees with data and information as opposed to just doing low-value repeatable tasks like password resets or printer setup. The bots are trained to perform guided actions to fix problems and execute service requests like booking conference rooms, travel, hotels, etc. These bots can easily be accessed over mobile devices, or PCs to provide instant support to the end-user community.
The digital workplace is adding new dimensions to businesses globally allowing companies to grow and compete. This pace of this change is only going to accelerate; the global CxOs have already placed digital workplace transformation at the heart of their corporate strategies to drive growth.
Innovation today is not something that happens only in the board room; it is clear that people and innovation in the workplace are equivalently essential assets. In a world where new-age technologies are disrupting industries, there’s an opportunity for organizations to reinvent their culture of innovation and create a modern workplace that engages and empowers people to do their best work. Redesigning the traditional workplace is about changing your approach to technology, social networks, and leadership practices. Digital workplace showcases the energy and flexibility of the modern organization, and it has proved to be more productive, responsive, and creative. So, are you ready?
To know more, please write to ask.cis@wipro.com
Ankur Sachdeva
Ankur Sachdeva leads the Digital Workplace Practice at Wipro. He is responsible for defining, incubating, and creating the product roadmap and strategy for the digital workplace, mobility, automation, analytics, collaboration, and employee experience. He has over 15 years of work experience and is based out of New York, US. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a Master of Business Administration degree and multiple certifications in ITIL, cloud, and other workplace technologies.
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