It is a well-known fact that the world we know today is moving toward a digital-forward culture. In this software-defined society, it has become vital for business owners to adopt future-proof strategies to survive in the industry. The innovations in digital solutions have provided robust answers to the problems related to management, infrastructure, workforce, and more. With multiple software and digital applications being used in the day-to-day workplace, these solutions are already transforming the everyday experiences and reshaping the company culture.
Apparently, embracing digital transformation is the key to staying competitive in this fast-paced era. If a business expects to deliver the best customer experiences and make the most of the market opportunities, they need to embark on the digital transformation journey quickly. This not only means identifying the areas where digital solutions can boost productivity and efficiency but also adopting a digital workplace culture that is geared toward service improvements. In fact, shifting to a digital workplace is the first step toward building a successful digital transformation strategy.
Read more: 5 Common Remote Work Challenges Solved by InfinCE Digital Workplace Solution
What is a Digital Workplace?
A digital workplace can be termed as adopting reliable digital solutions to manage the existing business processes. It is an organization-wide move, which aims to leverage the power of digital technology to control and maintain the day-to-day workloads of the company. A digital workplace essentially merges the usual working environments of your enterprise with remote-friendly solutions to facilitate new possibilities for work management and business growth.
According to Gartner, “The digital workplace enables new, more effective ways of working; raises employee engagement and agility; and exploits consumer-oriented styles and technologies.” The global research and advisory firm also add that when “done well, the digital workplace results in a more social, mobile, accessible and data-driven work environment.” This revolves around using different hardware and software applications to improve everyday processes, overseen by pre-defined work policies and procedures.
When deployed strategically, your digital workplace can also drive other benefits like faster and data-oriented decision-making, enhanced opportunities for innovation and business development, improved responsiveness to the varying business needs, and superior collaboration across the company. It is also seen that companies that move to a digital workplace see higher staff retention rates, improved team morale, and better employee and customer experiences. However, there are certain challenges to adopting a digital workplace as well, and you need to address those specifically to ensure success.
Read more: 5 Tips to Manage At-Home Workers and Boost Remote Work Productivity
Challenges in Moving to a Digital Workplace
A successful digital workplace heavily relies on how well it delivers a human-centered work experience. At the same time, it should cultivate digital culture, while focusing on boosting employee experience and making their lives simpler. Your digital workplace approach should also aim at developing powerful solutions that can drive innovation while allowing you to integrate multiple digital applications for that. Likewise, the new technology should also align with the legacy solutions and should not disrupt the workflow when you gradually move to the digital workplace.
If your digital workplace initiative fails to satisfy the demands highlighted above, it would not serve the purpose and could eventually fail. That is why you need a vision and a well-defined stratagem to avoid failure. In most cases, the below mistakes have led to the failure of digital workplace adoption.
1. Underrating Remote Work Options
In a nutshell, the digital workplace should allow employees to stay connected with the company and carry out their jobs from anywhere in the world. This means that you need to provide flexible solutions to facilitate remote work, with access to enterprise resources at any time, on any device, and from any place. Coupled with proper identity management and security solutions, this will result in creating a more dynamic and empowered workplace.
2. Not Deploying Productivity Tools
While custom solutions are a great way to make the daily workloads simpler, there are a lot of standard tools and applications as well that can do the job and avoid the need for customization. This will help you to cut expenses while making the most of available solutions to manage your workplace requirements. Besides, such pre-designed tools can also be simple to modify or upgrade as your needs change over time.
3. Not Focusing on the People
Just as it is very important to consider that you have the right digital solutions to carry out the day-to-day operations of your company, it is also vital that you consider the people who will be using those tools and technologies. In other words, you still need to ensure the utmost employee engagement to make sure that your digital workplace is a success and furnishes all the needs for improved productivity and overall efficiency.
4. Not Strategizing Diversified Experiences
Different people in your company would have different preferences and experiences when using digital tools and applications. As not all interfaces have the same functions, your employees may want to use multiple tools to manage their jobs. Yet this can eventually lead to chaos when they will have to juggle between different applications to get things done. That is why you need to pick an all-in-one workplace solution to make things easier for everyone.
5. Not Performing Usability Testing
Doing usability testing is essential to save time as well as ensure that your digital workplace solutions deliver better results. Meanwhile, it will also help to make certain that your employees fully trust the approach when the digital workplace is aimed at meeting all the company needs effectively. Enterprises that skip usability testing will not have sufficient data to settle on the right decisions and may lead to critical views from the users.
Read more: 5 Tips To Effectively Manage Remote Teams During Challenging Times
Best Practices When Moving to the Digital Workplace
There can be a lot of factors that drive digital workplace adoption. This can range from the need for better administration within an organization to having a robust initiative that helps in business growth. No matter what influenced you to move to digital workplace culture, you need to follow some best practices to ensure expected results.
- Identify the pain points in the existing workflow and determine how digital solutions can help to address them
- Figure out the way your employees work and how the digital workplace can help to improve productivity
- Discover the skills you will require to facilitate a smooth shift to digital workplace transformation
- Prepare a plan for execution and communicate your digital workplace strategy, measures, and milestones to your employees
- Recognize leaders and assign them the essential roles to carry out the digital workplace move efficiently across the company
Above all, you need to choose the right tools and technologies to ensure that your digital workplace adoption thrives and delivers the best outcomes. InfinCE is the most reliable one-in-one workplace collaboration platform that can cater to your varied demands in the best way. From corporate messaging tools to data management apps, you get it all in InfinCE to facilitate diverse digital workplace functions. Plus, with an all-in-one digital solution, you get to enjoy a streamlined experience, lower costs, as well as appropriate deployment and change management. Connect with our experts today, to know how we can help you transit better to a digital work environment.
