The challenge isn’t lack of data or dexterity with advanced analytics. It’s that many leadership teams are still struggling to build and maintain...
But today’s distributed workforces have made that a challenging endeavor. IT and business leaders are trying to optimize their real estate investments while accommodating their employees’ desire — and expectations — for more-flexible, hybrid work models.
It’s possible to have “one office” that crosses the physical and virtual worlds, one that flexes with employees and serves as their hub for both work and life. This united work space also brings agility to organizations struggling to determine the best use of their real estate.
That one office is the collaborative digital workplace.
At the forefront, the collaborative digital workplace delivers an employee experience that meets individuals’ productivity needs while encouraging and supporting collaboration. It must be inclusive, so the experience for remote as well as in-office workers is equitable. In addition, it has to be flexible enough to fluidly adapt as business or employee needs change and must provide a manageable experience for IT.
It’s possible to build that digital workplace right now. In fact, given that most companies are rethinking their office and real estate configurations, now is the best time to get started.
This e-book can help guide that journey. First,discover what’s holding back collaboration today. It’s likely that your organization is facing many of these challenges.
Next, get a picture of what’s possible with a reimagined employee experience and explore the capabilities that support the collaborative digital workplace.
Finally, delve into solutions that shape the future of work and a fully integrated employee experience, as well as the digital workplace services that are available.
Collaboration is the mother of innovation. Shared work and problem-solving accelerate business outcomes and enable faster decision-making.
Yet, collaborative work has become challenging amid distributed workforces. The global pandemic has caused most companies to implement a wide variety of digital tools — not just to remain operational but also to encourage collaboration and innovation. “There was a great deal of reactive strategy during COVID,” said Ron Xavier, Microsoft Center of Competency leader in Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace Services Global Practice. “Organizations meant well; they grabbed whatever collaborative solutions they thought best at the time or the easiest to roll out. That has led to sprawl, a lack of integration, and an employee experience that is not optimal.”
Now many organizations are stuck with multiple productivity tools. It’s common for knowledge workers to juggle several videoconferencing solutions as well as email, chat, and document sharing tools — in addition to enterprise apps. The plethora of digital solutions is causing many workers to feel “always on,” resulting in digital exhaustion.
“The smorgasbord of collaboration tools inhabiting the virtual-first workplace is — in many cases — undermining the productivity it was originally intended to foster,” according to seven-time CIO Mark Settle.
Burnout is affecting IT staff, too. Support staffs are managing multiple tools that often don’t integrate. It’s extra effort amid the world of remote and hybrid work, which 74% of CIOs say has increased the stress on their IT teams, according to Foundry’s “State of the CIO Study 2022.”
The problem is not just technology burnout. There’s cost sprawl associated with paying for all these licenses, in some cases for software that is not even being used. It also affects security; the more solutions, the greater the potential for vulnerabilities or gaps that hackers can exploit. Some digital tools weren’t built for document sharing, for example, which increases the chance of data leakage.
Meanwhile, IT and business leaders are challenged by the need to reconfigure physical work spaces. Given that many workers don’t want to return to onsite facilities or would be willing to do so only a few days per week or month, leaders are figuring out how to provide desk, cubicle, meeting room, and office flexibility.
There are questions to consider, such as: Should employees reserve a desk or a meeting room? What capabilities do we need for collaborative spaces, including hardware and software? How can we encourage ongoing collaboration and not diminish productivity?
Organizations can address these questions by building a collaborative digital workplace.
“It’s time to turn the digital tools chaos into an efficient approach that makes the employee experience easy to manage, efficient, productive, and seamless,” said Xavier.