Prepare for the Future of Work: Turn Your Organization into a Digital Workplace
At the time of writing this blog post, the dreaded Coronavirus has overturned the world’s corporate scenario. In order to contain the infection, companies are encouraging their employees to work from home.
Hopefully, we’ll find a cure for the virus but the concept of remote working is here to stay. In fact, Buffer’s State Of Remote Work 2020 study found that 98% of their respondents wanted to work remotely “at least at some point of their careers.”
In parallel, we also see distributed teams becoming increasingly common. Professionals from various corners of the world come together now for projects more often than ever before in history. As the world shrinks and the internet fuels business progress, there is one thing every organization needs to be – a digital workplace.
What Is a Digital Workplace?
A digital workplace is one where your employees can perform to their best of abilities without entering the office premise. It is the one-stop-shop where they have the tools they need to find colleagues, communicate with them, collaborate efficiently, and do their work effectively.
This typically takes the form of an organization-wide technology platform, a significantly upgraded and highly-customised intranet, if you will.
Why Should You Go For A Digital Workplace?
Firstly because remote work will soon grow to be commonplace. Millennial workers will want the freedom to work from wherever they are. But you, as the employer, need them to collaborate and work in teams. To find the right balance, you need to be a digital workplace.
In such an environment, the information will become powerful. Let’s say you are a global consulting firm. And an employee from one of your regional offices is looking for some help. By offering them the ability to access documents belonging to global teams, you are empowering them with information that might otherwise be unavailable to them. More importantly, you are also providing access to global employees who can advise them, thereby multiplying the strengths of your teams.
Self-service will become a necessity. With large distributed teams, being able to answer each person’s questions/needs manually will require a significant financial investment by companies. A truly digital workplace can help optimize these investments through meaningful automation and chatbots.
Motivation will become difficult to track. If every member of your team is working remotely, and don’t make it a point to share more openly with you, how do you motivate them to collaborate actively do their best work? A digital workplace can offer digital solutions for this through gamification and rewards programs.
Most importantly, work itself will grow to be more digital. For instance, the use of paper as a form of record will reduce, your sales teams will request for digital signatures and send electronic invoices. Or much of the internal tasks like travel booking, leave application etc. will take place online. Your organization must be equipped to enable that.
In short, becoming a digital workplace is like having a company website. Just like how today’s customer doesn’t even believe business to be legitimate if it doesn’t have a website, employees will find it stifling if they can’t do their work online. In order to hire and nurture the best minds in the 2020s, you need to be a digital workplace.
What Should a Digital Workplace Platform Have?
At PeopleOne, we think of a digital workplace across four dimensions: Business, communication, content and collaboration.
- Business is where the employee interacts with the company — HR, finance, admin etc.
- Communication is where the company speaks to the employee — announcements, news, FAQs etc.
- Content is when employees create content and share knowledge — blogs, individual profiles, document management etc.
- Social is where collaboration happens — instant messaging, Q&As, interest-based communities etc.
It is on these four pillars that we’ve built PeopleOne, a feature-rich digital workplace solution. Whether you’re looking for an upgrade for an existing enterprise social network, or need a completely new solution, we can help.
In the light on the ongoing crisis, we are offering the PeopleOne digital workplace solution to the SMB community members, free of charge for the first three months!
