Rethinking Your Digital Workspace

Now is the time  to rethink how you work – here’s how to go about it

Organisations have the opportunity to make lasting, beneficial changes to the way staff work. A health check of your digital workspace is an excellent place to start.

By Jason Poyner, CEO, Deptive

In 2020, the nature of work changed forever. The pandemic forced us into home offices, up-ended our usual ways of collaborating and required a level of flexibility and trust that existed in few workplaces previously.

We scrambled to serve our customers, partners and employees as best we could in this new environment. We embraced digital work, clocked up hours in video conferences and adapted to a new ecosystem of apps and platforms.

Somehow, we survived what Covid-19 threw at us. But now we are in a new phase – the new normal. Decisions made in haste may no longer serve us well. We added complexity to our digital working environment and in the process risked compromising network and data security.

The new digital equilibrium

One thing is certain – the accelerated digital transformation organisations, big and small, went through will not be undone. A new equilibrium of work has emerged that is more distributed, more flexible and more digital.

But each organisation and its workforce needs to find its own digital equilibrium. At Deptive, we firmly believe that success in doing so starts and ends with people. When you are delivering a successful digital workspace for your employees, you are providing more than the digital tools your people need to be productive.

You are empowering everyone in the organisation to help in delivering your goals, but doing so in a way that values the wellbeing of each and every one of your people.

In Deptive’s view, taking the time now to set your organisation up for digital workspace success will make you more resilient to whatever else the world throws at us in the coming months and years.

In real terms, it will allow you to:

• Reduce operational costs – Introduce more effective ways to meet virtually, cutting travel and telecommunication costs. Create more efficient means of device provisioning and management.
• Attract and retain the best people – Create an awesome employee experience by providing modern technology experiences along with great culture and a modern physical workplace. Create a place where people actually want to work.
• Secure data and IP – Ensure organisational data, intellectual property, and identities are secure from malicious and accidental exploitations.
• Raise productivity and efficiency – Provide tools and technologies that help employees execute business processes and functions quickly and accurately.
• Improve digital dexterity – Improve the desire and ability of employees to embrace existing and emerging technologies to achieve better business outcomes.
• Enhance innovation – Foster communication and collaboration and build communities of interest to drive innovation.
• Achieve process improvements – Reduce mistakes, free up people’s time and allow them to work on more valuable projects.

Designed and executed well, digital workspaces raise employee wellbeing, engagement and productivity. Done poorly, employees will be disconnected from the goals and culture of the organisation and from each other. You will be a less effective organisation as a result.

Whether you are setting out to tweak the digital workspace that emerged and evolved in your organisation over the past year, or seeking to reimagine the employee experience completely, the process starts and ends with your people. Co-designing and co-developing your digital workspace is crucial to ensuring your people confidently and purposefully inhabit this new environment.

Think and act strategically – five steps to take

No matter the size of the project, there are five strategic actions we at Deptive believe will allow you to lay the groundwork for a Successful Digital Workspace Programme.

They include:

1. Define and document your motivations – Meet with key stakeholders, from frontline employees, to IT managers to the executive team, to document the shared motivations behind digital workspace adoption.
2. Craft a vision statement – Collaboratively develop a short document that encapsulates the agreed values that will define how people work.
3. Document expected business outcomes – Engage motivated stakeholders in the organisation to document specific business outcomes to be achieved.
4. Develop a business case – A successful digital workspace requires investment, so creating a business case to validate the financial model that supports your motivations and outcomes is imperative.
5. Choose the right first project – Your first digital workspace adoption project will help align motivations with technical effort and hint at the future transformation potential.

Giving these five things your time and attention will set you off on the path to developing a successful digital workspace strategy. But it is seldom a straightforward journey. You will be faced with conflicting priorities and resource constraints. Considering these issues may expose institutional rivalries and technical debt that is limiting your ability to bring about change.

You will need to find that delicate balance between security and flexibility and establish the best ways of fostering trust so that your workforce can increasingly work in the modes that promote their wellbeing and job satisfaction, while achieving the organisation’s goals.

If the pandemic showed us anything, it is that we are all capable of more change than we think. By putting your people first, you can make sure that change sets your organisation up to make the most of the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Deptive is here to assist you on your digital workplace journey. Find out more on our Modern Workplace Page or Contact us today to find out about our services, which are designed to help your organisation make the best use of technology to enable a successful digital workplace.