Digital workplace

A digital workplace is where work is what you do, not where you go to. While your physical workplace is your cubicle or desk in the office or at home, your digital workplace is the total of the computer applications that you work with. Your digital workplace can be your company's intranet and related/integrated applications, the set of apps on your iPad, or the total of downloaded software and cloud applications on your notebook. You can work in your digital workplace from any location - in the office, in the train or at your dining table.

Jane McConnell of NetJMC writes about the origin and use of the term in this article. The word "Digital Workplace" appears to be used first in How to create a Digital Workplace by Jeffrey Beir from eRoom Technology Inc. in 2000.

To have a successful digital workplace organisations must have the right strategy, culture, environment and infrastructure to exploit the benefits fully. It becomes the natural way of working so everyone is more productive and your organisation more efficient with:

• people work from any location as well as their office workstation
• IT infrastructure for the same or similar experience
• everyone can read news, collaborate, search and complete tasks
• individuals choosing tools – RSS, mobile, etc. – that help them
• organisations measure benefits and encourages digital workplace

To have a great digital workplace, you need to follow some ‘must have’ principles including strategy, engagement, governance, HR policies and IT infrastructure.

Strategy

Alignment

It is vital that your digital workplace strategy is aligned with your organisation’s overall strategy. There is no point planning to invest time and resources to move in one direction if your organisation is going in the opposite way. You need to be clear what your organisations’ future plans are and make sure your strategy shows how it will help to achieve them.

Scope

A digital workplace strategy is wider than most intranet strategies. It’s more than the traditional role for information published online. It needs to also cover:

• where people will be working – mobile, home, cafes
• how everyone will be working – laptops, smartphones, public PCs
• what individuals will need for their work – processes, collaboration, email

Priorities

You need to have plans for the:

• short term (0 – 3 months)
• medium term (3 – 12 months)
• long term (over 1 year)

You also need to prioritise the actions you plan to take based on what will benefit your organisation based on:

• Most people will benefit from
• Most savings for your organisation
• Quickest to implement

Stakeholders

You need to identify who will have the biggest influence on your strategy and who will be affected the most. They may be the same people!

These are your stakeholders who you need to maintain good relationships with for your strategy to a) be implemented and b) have the greatest chance of succeeding.

They may be representing finance, your CEO (as well as your CEO), IT, HR and operational units.

Resources

Who apart from you is going to create, support and implement your digital workplace strategy? You will need a team of people, maybe a virtual team practicing digital workplace ways of working.

It is important you focus on the top priorities so you can achieve the maximum change with the resources you have.

As well as people you hopefully will have some budget which needs to be spent wisely so you can show the biggest gain from the money invested.

Engagement

It is absolutely critical to your organisation to have people working who are fully engaged. They are satisfied with their roles, happy with their work and their colleagues and look forward to working each day. If not then the costs of lost productivity and extra time spent managing for the same or less output can be horrendous.

There are two audiences you need to engage:

• For the success of your strategy: your stakeholders
• For the ongoing success of the digital workplace: everyone

Stakeholders

You have to engage the people who will have biggest influence on your strategy and who will be affected the most. These are your stakeholders. They will represent the key functions of the organisation that are either the first priority and/or the biggest factor in whether it succeeds or fail.

Your stakeholders need to buy-in to your digital workplace strategy at the decision making level of your organisation. You need to communicate clearly and timely what their involvement will be. They won’t want any nasty surprises – just nice ones!

This is a similar approach to how stakeholders are engaged for successful SharePoint 2010 implementations.

Everyone

How do you get everyone to be comfortable with a digital workplace? You need to make sure the ideal culture for a digital workplace is in place or planned for before you start. There are seven factors you need in place for this to work:

1.Everyone who will benefit is able to adopt this new way of working.  Some may already be working like this, some partly and others planning to.
2.There is enthusiasm for working in a digital workplace.  It is seen as something positive, that people will want to do and be envious of those who already can.
3.The culture in your organisation is strong on ‘doing things online’ so individuals can carry out their normal work tasks in a digital workplace.
4.You are encouraged to share knowledge to help anyone in your organisation no matter where their location is or time zones they normally work in.  You may also be incentivised to do this.
5.You can easily use the tools with no or minimal training to collaborate and share knowledge.
6.Policies and processes that encourage everyone to use the digital workplace and don’t restrict innovation.
7.Individuals can easily move from a physical location where they regularly meet their work colleagues to remote locations without feeling isolated because the digital workplace tools help to avoid this.

Applying this approach helps to create a buzz around the organisation for digital working. People feel envious of those who have started. There is impatience for everyone to benefit.

Organisations start to see improved productivity and levels of service, processes streamlined and absentee rates dropping.

Governance

It is important the whole of the digital workplace is managed so that it brings benefits to the organisation, individuals and collectively, everyone. It should mean the feeling that ‘things are better’ permeates through to everyone and encourages even greater use of the digital workplace.

It means the level of governance balances the rewards to be gained while avoiding any risks. That doesn’t come naturally but through good governance of the digital workplace including:

Ownership

Who is responsible for developing the strategy, implementing the digital workplace and ongoing management of it? It is difficult for one person to have overall responsibility for so many key roles and activities. Neither is it best for it to be one person.

The best solution is to have a steering group made up of stakeholders from key parts of the business most affected by the digital workplace. These stakeholders should be senior people with decision making authority not someone who has to refer back to his/her line manager and delay matters.

There may be dedicated roles for people responsible for collaboration, ways of working, etc, but they should ultimately report in to the steering group.

The worse solution is to have competing groups of people each implementing conflicting standards, designs and ways to use the digital workplace. That will be a disaster and must be avoided!

Consistency

You really need a consistent level of governance across your digital workplace. By consistent I don’t mean the same. I mean it is what everyone using the digital workplace would expect or need.

For publishers/site owners who are publishing in the digital workplace accredited types of content (policies, factual stuff) the expectation is for a more rigorous approach than for collaborative content where opinions and views require a lighter touch.

For people using the digital workplace to view information and news, use workflow applications or collaborate with each other, they expect the look and feel of the digital workplace to be similar. Tools needs to be branded in line with the business’ colours and designs. Features need to encourages everyone to use them more such as help links, contact points, easily laid out and functional designs.

All the different parts of the digital workplace need to be integrated so they are seen as one whole entity not a different set of silos, resources with some electronic sticking plaster added to make them look as if they are connected when they don’t give that impression to anyone using them.

Standards

One approach is to have a set of standards based on the needs of the organisation (information retention), regulation (who has permission to see what), legal (web accessibility) and technical (DNS policy). These can be applied appropriately across the digital workplace for each activity. So for formal type content (policies and procedures) it’s most likely all the standards will apply. For applications (HR processes) it’s probable that most will apply too. But for collaboration you will apply a lighter touch.

Alternatively you can create standards that only apply to certain information and applications to meet the purpose people need to use it for.

It is about getting the balance right again. You don’t need to be too restrictive and stifle innovation and collaboration. But you don’t want it to be too loose so that the business and individuals risk non-compliance with a legal or regulatory requirements. It’s not easy but getting it right is critical and benefits everyone and the business.

Integrity

This is the real litmus test, the crunch point for me. Do people have confidence in the information and tools they are using in the digital workplace? Does everyone feel encouraged to use the digital workplace more after each time?

The answer has to be ‘YES!’ to these questions. That is the outcome your strategy and plans should aim for.

However you do this it must balance the needs of the business with those of people working well in a digital workplace.

HR policies

It is vital that Human Resources policies encourage digital working. It needs to create the culture where the behaviours typically found with digital working are in place. This can be achieved in a variety of ways.

Engage

Your business needs engaged people working to achieve their own, team and overall business goals. HR policies must help engage everyone more to the business. This can be achieved by:

• allowing access to social network tools like Facebook and Twitter. Policies balance risk with rewards of engaging and sharing knowledge.
• having a new ideas scheme to encourage suggestions for improvements to the business and rewarding successful ideas.
• building a more informal, less hierarchical structure and management style so any individual feels they can approach any person to ask for help or offer helpful advice.
• encouraging feedback. Individuals should feel confident they can raise contentious but relevant issues and get a helpful response that takes their views seriously. People should not need anonymity, neither should the ‘career limiting question’ apply.
• treating everyone as responsible adults and trusting they will behave online accordingly

Incentivise

What’s in it for me? That’s a typical response to any policy decision made especially when it is an HR policy affecting many people. Employees need to see digital working as beneficial to them. This can be achieved by:

• recognising positively their move to a digital workplace
• rewarding them for moving to a digital workplace
• incentivising (by recognition and/or reward) knowledge sharing using digital workplace tools
• performance framework rewards outputs not time spent in an office
• having a simple set of guidelines saying what can be said (nothing slanderous, etc) and encouraging this behaviour by applying a common sense approach

Working styles

People need to be encouraged to work in a digital workplace. This can be done in a variety of ways:

• paying for their furniture and phone/internet connection at home
• making sure they have a laptop/ipad/smartphone so they can be in connected to their digital workplace and when travelling on business
• training managers to manage employees remotely. Just because they are out of sight doesn’t mean they are not working effectively! A facilitating rather than directing management style will help.
• flexible working hours to fit a sustainable work/life balance
• having confidence their personal information is secure while being accessible from any locations with correct permissions

Infrastructure

These digital workplace principles won’t work without the right IT infrastructure in place. This will include:

Equipment

Making sure people have the right kit to take advantage of the opportunities digital working offers. Organisations need to fund and provide laptops, smart phones, broadband and/or wifi, tablets like iPads and monitor screens for homeworking. All these are needed for individuals to do their type of work effectively. The aim must be more productive workers who are happier because their work/life balance is better.

Connection

Access to the digital workplace when employees need it is the most critical thing to get right. Get it wrong and digital working won’t happen – simple as that. The network needs to be reliable for speed and availability. If it is frequently down for a hour or so people won’t trust it and be reluctant to change their behaviour so the digital workplace strategy works. If it is slow then people also will vote with their feet and stay in a physical office where the people they need can be contacted.

People must be confident they have secure access to the digital workplace and the organisation needs to be confident it will not be abused by anyone not in that organisation’s buildings. For example if you want to check your pay record online you want 100% confidence only you can do this. Likewise if you need to access sensitive information online the organisation also needs 100% reassurance only those with the right permissions, like you, can use it.

Services

Organisation must have developed and have available the things people need to do their work. Research may be needed before digital workplace is implemented:

• What is the information needed?
• What applications are needed for their work?
• What collaborative tools for sharing?
• Are there mobile versions?

All of these need to be available when they are needed. And don’t guess what they are – invest the time, effort and money to research fully what is needed. It will be seen as an investment in the months afterwards when you see people using the digital workplace because it has all they need for their work.

Make sure these meet the needs of people using. THEY MUST BE USABLE! If not, you will waste a lot of potential benefits in time taken trying to use unsuitable tools.

All of these help create the confidence needed to encourage everyone who is able to, to move to a digital workplace. This may need up front investment but the business case should show the savings made in office space, travel costs, time saved quickly justify the costs.