The secret to a successful
Digital Workplace: optimisation

Deploying a Digital Workplace is not a project that stops the day it goes live. So how do you make a Digital Workplace a success?

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The secret of its success lies in its ability to evolve according to the needs of its users. If you want to understand how to optimize your Digital Workplace so that it becomes the number one work tool for your employees, you're in the right place! Find out how to create adoption and what philosophy to adopt so that the final product appeals to all your teams.

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How do you get employees to adopt the Digital Workplace?

The recipes for a digital workplace to be adopted by its future users are now well known to experts. They can be summarized in a few points:

A common environment for all communication tools, collaborations and applications;
A platform adapted to the real needs of the company;
Optimal user experience and advanced design;
Personalized content;
Multilingual support ;
Business tools fully integrated into the environment.

In the 2021 edition of its Digital Workplace barometer, the consulting firm Julhiet Sterwen highlights the role of digital in the Covid crisis. In particular, it points to its importance in hybrid work, a work organization that is set to continue. Indeed, 60% of the employees surveyed believe that digital has a positive role for themselves and 64% attribute a positive role to it for their company. The notion that stands out the most is the ability of digital to empower employees (77% of managers surveyed). The digital workplace must therefore be designed with autonomy in mind and a teleworking employee must be able to adapt his or her working environment independently. What is now called the WX (Workplace experience) appears to be a major competitive challenge for all companies in 2022. A study by the MIT Center for Information has demonstrated the direct correlation between the quality of the employee experience and the company's ability to innovate, customer satisfaction (NPS) and the company's profitability.

Read: The 10 best practices of collaborative work

5 rules to facilitate employee adoption of the Digital Workplace

1. Putting the user at the center of the project

This concerns both the functional aspect and the content that will be presented to each employee: all the content must correspond to their real needs. It is important to ensure that they have access to "corporate" content but also to targeted information concerning their sector of activity, their job or even their work group. Unlike the static intranets of the 2000s, personalization and constant renewal of content build user loyalty and keep them engaged. This lesson learned from e-commerce sites and video platforms applies equally to content delivered in a Digital Workplace.

2. Make the user autonomous

As we have seen, the content presented to the user is delivered by profile (or persona) and personalized according to their business needs. But the most important thing is that the user is able to personalize his experience.

After the change management phase and a rapid introduction to the environment, the employee will use all the tools at his disposal, but also adapt the environment to his own uses. The ergonomics of the Digital Workplace allow the user to be partly autonomous in terms of personalizing their environment. He can rearrange his screen himself to place content sources and tools as he sees fit. Since they retain control over the organization of their screen, they can highlight the content and functional blocks that are most useful to them on a daily basis. However, his company should retain the option of making some (or all) of the blocks mandatory on the screen.

Read: Agility, the key to a Digital Workplace built to last

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3. Focus on use cases

Although a Digital Workplace is intended to reflect the company's image, it is also an operational tool. When setting up the Digital Workplace, it is important to think about the main use cases that will be implemented by users during agile design workshops. The project team will use them to develop the screens for the priority use cases.

These pre-configured screens will be delivered at the time of initial deployment and can then be adapted by the users themselves. Indeed, within the same process, some people use the business application first, others the ERP or collaborative tools. It is therefore important that everyone can organize their screen according to the specificities of their function, but also their preferences and habits.

The flexibility of the platform plays a very important role in terms of workplace ergonomics and, ultimately, employee productivity. The launch of a Digital Workplace on an initial series of key use cases will make it possible to demonstrate the value of the tool on "Quick-Wins", to have it adopted, to generate an initial ROI and thus to perpetuate the approach throughout the company.

4. Measuring usage to better optimize it

Giving users autonomy must be the leitmotiv of a Digital Workplace project. However, users must not be left alone to take responsibility for the development of the tool. The project team's role is to guide users towards new uses. For example, it can propose the new collaborative tools of Microsoft Teams, promote the exchange spaces on Yammer, the use of Bots, etc.

Having metrics on how the platform is actually being used will help managers identify the features that employees are actually using. Microsoft 365, for example, delivers productivity scores that allow an organization's performance in terms of communication, content sharing, teamwork, meetings and mobility to be assessed.

This information on the real uses of the Digital Workplace makes it possible to identify which tool is being neglected by users or, on the contrary, to spot one that is being used a lot by a department. It is then interesting to capitalize on a new innovative usage and spread it throughout the rest of the company.

This role of communication and support for the transformation of uses is crucial to the long-term success of the Digital Workplace.

5. More than an IT project, an opening onto the future of work

The Digital Workplace team must provide constant support to employees and help with the transformation of uses. A Digital Workplace project does not stop once the deployment of the tool is completed and the users are trained. The platform is a living solution that transforms itself to adapt to the changes faced by employees.

Governance established by the company ensures that the Digital Workplace functions properly, that it is distributed to new entities, and that new functionalities are implemented and applications rationalized. This governance also makes proposals to the business lines in order to propose new tools and new collaboration techniques. In this respect, a Digital Workplace is not a project with a start and end date, but a real process of continuous improvement.

In conclusion

Improving the employee experience is of course about the organization of the company and the quality of the management, but the importance of tools should not be overlooked. The "Future of Work, U.S. and Europe" study published by IDC in November 2018, already ranked the importance of equipping employees with the right tools as the number one lever for improving the employee experience. This focus on improvement has resulted in the rise of Digital Workplace solutions, a market that will grow 21.3% annually between 2020 and 2026. As a natural extension to Microsoft 365, Mozzaik365 provides a powerful, future-proof and secure solution for the digital workplace. It doubles the functionality of SharePoint to access even more use cases and business needs. Discover the list of use cases.

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Things to remember

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📌 Improving the employee experience is not only about the quality of management, the tools matter;

📌 The Digital Workplace market will grow at a CAGR of 21, 3% between 2020 and 2026;

📌 The number one lever to improve the employee experience is to provide them with the right tools;

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FAQ

The secret to a successful Digital Workplace

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