Today’s workplaces are highly digital and employers need to embrace this trend by understanding their employee personas and providing technology that enables them to do their best work.

Gone are the days when the workplace was just a space for employees to do work and hang out with colleagues. With the emergence of digital technologies, fast-changing customer needs, and increasing competition from companies with digitally-skilled employees, a digital workplace is much more common and a must. Today, these digital workplaces are always connected and have instant access to the working environment, blurring the lines between a physical workplace and where the work actually happens.

As a business in the early stages of development, understanding the role and importance of a digital workplace and a strategy to go with it, along with the biggest drivers will enable your organisation to truly shift to a digital culture that embraces efficiency, innovation, and growth.

What is the role of the digital workplace?

There is now an endless list of digital technologies available to employees (from e-mail clients, instant messaging, and social media tools to customer relationship management (CRM) systems and virtual meeting tools).

The digital workplace's main role is to bring about all these technologies and integrate them in a natural way that allows employees to break down communication barriers. Ultimately, positioning an organisation and its employees to transform internal and external experiences and foster efficiency, innovation, and growth.

But according to The digital workplace: Think, share, do article by Deloitte, it is further stressed that the key to success, however, lies in the effective implementation of a digital workplace strategy capable of driving true cultural change.

Why is a digital workplace important?

Besides the importance of the role a digital workplace plays, the emergence of the pandemic has led businesses to embrace digital workplaces at an even faster pace. Remote work and a dispersed workforce are some of the biggest reasons why organisations need to become more digital.

Harnessing an effective digital workplace strategy

Deloitte offers one of many other digital workplace frameworks available out there that can help you build an effective digital workplace strategy. Nonetheless, Deloitte has one of the most comprehensive analyses of the emergence and characteristics of a digital workplace.

Its framework is based on four areas of focus, namely, Use, Technology, Control, and Business Drivers, with the employee at the centre of everything. Here's a brief overview of the four focus areas.

Use: collaborate, communicate, connect

The goal is to forge productive business relationships within and beyond natural workgroups and to enable knowledge sharing across the organisation.

The widespread proliferation of information technology is changing the ways in which employees connect, collaborate and communicate.

According to Deloitte, the emergence of 3 fundamental trends has accelerated the change.

• Changing workforce: As the baby boomers retire, knowledge is leaving the company, increasing the need to capture it. On the other side, the new generation of workers is very IT savvy and expect to have flexible easy to use tools just as they have in their private life. Furthermore, South Africans are extremely entrepreneurial as they are, on average, almost twice as likely to be focused on building up their entrepreneurial skills compared to their global peers.
• Information overload: Information is still growing at exponential rates and employees can’t find what they need, even with technological advances.
• The need for speed: With the rapid pace of today’s work environment, employees increasingly need to work faster and collaborate more effectively to get their jobs done. A study done by Xerox found that by simply digitising data collection a single employee can save 528 hours per year.

With the widespread proliferation of technologies available to facilitate this change, it is important for an organisation to maintain a strong focus and prevent information overload. An article on information overload from Deloitte Digital discusses the problem of information overload faced by consumer products companies and goes on further to offer an easy to follow FOCUS framework that can help your business achieve employee collaboration, communication, and connection with the right amount of information and focus.

Technology: the digital toolbox

The key is to adopt the right digital tools for your employees to do their jobs.

This is important because 64% of employees would opt for a lower-paying job if they could work away from the office and when employee engagement increases, there is a corresponding increase in employee retention by up to 87%.

A quick response to changes in your employees' needs will ensure that the right tools are always used for your digital workplace. Tracking these changes can be cumbersome but using the FOCUS framework can enable a much clearer pathway. In essence, when strategising on how to track employee needs for determining the right technology consider the following factors:

• Support changes in working style
• Unify offline and online communications
• Focus on employee experience
• Provide choice, flexibility and personalization
• Support virtual work environments
• Minimize spending and enhance productivity
• Win the war on talent

Furthermore, assess your capabilities in each technology category (see the table below), identify your focus areas and refer to your organisation’s culture and business requirements to identify the tools you most need.

Control: governance, risk and compliance

Information flow and use must also comply with your organisation’s policies and industry regulations.

Organisations must develop a governance model that supports connectivity and collaboration while mitigating risks and enabling compliance.

Deloitte's digital workplace framework highlights 2 aspects to implementing digital workplace governance.

Firstly, it highlights the components of digital workplace governance.

• Guiding principles
• Information governance strategy
• Roles and responsibilities
• Training and certification

Secondly, it highlights the actions an organisation can take for risk mitigation and compliance.

• Information monitoring, collection and analysis
• Policy training
• Orchestrated presence
• Crisis management

Chris Tubb, a digital workplace and intranet consultant from Spark Trajectory, highlighted five predictable outcomes from a lack of digital workplace governance: overlapping tools, wasteful procurement, fragmented user experience, poor information management and lack of findability. Of which he further went into detail about in a LinkedIn article.

Business drivers: measurable business value

To deliver the necessary benefits, the direction of your organisation should guide the direction of your digital workplace. Your digital workplace must address existing challenges and provide business value.

In short, your employees need to know what is in it for them. Here are some ways to achieve measurable value:

• Increase revenue
• Reduce operational costs
• Accelerate time-to-market
• Enhance innovation
• Improve the customer experience
• Increase agility and flexibility
• Heighten staff satisfaction
• Raise productivity and efficiency
• Strengthen talent recruitment and retention
• Improve employee experience

A Digital Workplace with Tangible Results

Your digital workplace strategy should provide you with tangible results or else there is no point. As a small business, you should use the digital workplace framework and FOCUS framework to hone in on the right strategy to help you achieve your business goals. Your strategy should measure the right business drivers applicable to your goals to ensure that tangible results can be achieved.

Here are 2 examples of tangible results highlighted in the same digital workplace framework by Deloitte

• Time savings: one company found that a manager saved 43 minutes a month with improved workplace tools. With over 30,000 managers, the company estimated an annual productivity increase of $12 million.
• Customer efficiency: sellers reduced the time they spent on management activities by one to three hours due to system integration and increased collaboration tools.

Just to repeat, we believe and strongly recommend Deloitte's digital workplace framework for any business interested in implementing a digital workplace. As such, a large proportion of this article introduces you to the framework and its comprehensive guide and analyses.