Transform the Digital Workplace for Enhanced Engagement

Hybrid work continues to challenge leaders around two organizational success factors:

• Organizational alignment enabled by a culture that attracts and retains talent and makes them feel part of a community, while also providing accountability and transparency into how work gets done

• Personal and team growth in a context of dispersed hybrid teams, which still need talent management and robust talent development

Employees also face their own challenges. Since the pandemic, the technology capabilities enabling the digital transformation of the workplace have replaced team proximity, while also creating the need for a digitally dexterous workforce — one that has the ambition and ability to use technology for better business outcomes.

This transition brings growing pains. New technology often produces change fatigue, as employees are repeatedly asked to adapt how they work and how they synchronize with teammates and other groups, who may be assimilating the change at a different rate.

Managing the adjustments and mitigating the challenges require organizations to embrace the idea of the DEX. This is a human-centric, digital workplace strategy designed to help employees experience the benefits of digital dexterity for themselves and their teams. The DEX is a critical contributor to employee engagement and employee satisfaction in digital workplaces.

Digital workplace leaders typically struggle to establish and continuously improve the DEX. Their challenges include an overwhelming rate of technical change, a lack of understanding about employee needs and wants, a tendency to overprioritize technology-based solutions to address nontechnical problems, and employee change fatigue.

To manage these challenges, start by aligning with employee experience partners across the organization — especially across HR, IT and corporate real estate — and developing employee personas.

An integrated and flexible digital workplace requires employee experience leaders to align with key partners in HR, IT and corporate real estate. Together, you can work to understand what digital workplace capabilities employees need to be satisfied, effective and prepared.

Include application leaders to:

• Expand the employee value proposition to include increased access to and decision making power over digital technology tools

• Focus on understanding areas of digital friction and digital fatigue, and strategies for increasing technological upskilling or reskilling

Digital workplace solutions are not a set-it-and-forget-it environment. The reality of accelerated technology roadmaps and expanded technology portfolios means this partnership must get stronger and evolve. Revisit the DEX and the technology portfolio supporting it at regular intervals to rationalize it and reduce redundant applications.

Personas are employee profiles created to summarize information about the behavior and preferences of real-life employees. Personas are one of the most powerful tools to inform your digital workplace strategy and anticipate what employees with similar behaviors and preferences care about. They help digital workplace leaders prioritize investments, build strategic plans and manage friction. Effective personas:

• Center on the employee

• Enrich empathy in technology decision makers

Use the employee personas you developed to identify sources of digital friction in the most important employee journeys. Some common digital workplace strategy initiatives include:

Empowered business technologists increasingly enable business units to own their IT investments. They include employees specifically hired to build and maintain technology, as well as those with a business job title but who nonetheless build technical capabilities to perform work better, faster or cheaper. Enterprises that successfully enable business technologists are 2.6 times more likely to accelerate digital business outcomes, according to Gartner’s Reimagining Technology Work Survey.

Use personas to understand where employees experience a digital dexterity gap, which widens when the rate at which the organization deploys technology exceeds the employee’s ability to use it. Personas allow digital workplace leaders and other workplace partners to address employee digital dexterity gaps by:

• Nudging, rewards and recognition, and employee development

• Communicating and encouraging strategies that connect employees to colleagues and resources

• Empowering business technologists to be trusted partners

Personas can help digital workplace leaders identify digital friction, defined as unnecessary effort to use data or technology. Use journey map techniques to hunt for digital employee friction by breaking down the employee journey into specific moments, pain points and challenges. Create one journey map for each persona for a given situation.

Personas help corporate real estate teams better understand the work styles and preferences of employees who use corporate office space. Hybrid employees use the office in different ways, at different times and for different durations, posing challenges to the design of the workplace and digital workplace technology.

Welcoming a new employee means navigating an overabundance of onboarding steps, approvals and systems. It’s rare that employees have what they need from IT on Day 1 — not a great first impression. Personas help IT streamline, remove and automate process steps, and establish technology and application bundles for new hires. Collectively, these efforts can improve the DEX from the outset.

Use the alignment with employee experience partners and employee personas to develop a digital workplace technology strategy using a digital workplace blueprint. This is an experience-driven architecture for guiding decisions about applications, portfolio management and success metrics.

A digital workplace blueprint is based on “work hubs” that are centers of employee activity, each with a distinct purpose. For example:

• The work hub, the centerpiece of the digital workplace blueprint, is the personal and team productivity hub.

• The employee engagement hub helps communicate and inform employees on the organization’s news, mission, culture and goals.

• The employee services hub provides employees with information and support related to issues such as professional development or retirement benefits.

• The technology services hub provides employees with service and self-service centered on technology support.

• Role-based hubs provide experiences with applications and services unique to their business roles.