05/23/2022 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 05/23/2022 08:21
The digital workspace movement has been building over the last several years, as companies shifted more of their workloads to software applications and cloud systems. Even if employees were in the office, they were usually working on applications they could easily access from elsewhere. Companies recognised the need to unify the work experience from corporate locations, but what about from remote locations?
That's where a digital workspace comes into play. It's a virtual replacement for the traditional office space that offers employees access to all the digital tools, applications, and systems they need to perform their work. A digital workspace aligns the right technology with your workloads and processes to power your company's objectives.
Creating a digital workspaceis more of a marathon than a sprint. It's not just a project that's completed in a quarter. It requires a well thought-out strategy that's rolled out in several phases in a few weeks or months.
If your company is considering creating a digital workspace for your employees, you're in the right place. We created this comprehensive guide to creating a digital workspace that explains what it is, the benefits to a digital workspace, how to set up a foundation for one, and more.
A digital workspace offers employees a common set of tools that enable them to work together in a frictionless way. It gives them more flexibility for remote work as they can work from anywhere on any device as if they were at a corporate location. From an IT perspective, a digital workspace allows companies to enable the same type of security as in their corporate locations and be confident in the protection surrounding business-critical resources, no matter where they're accessed from.
Today's employees also expect a digital-centric work environment no matter their employer's industry or market. It's becoming more of a given today, so not having a digital workspace may impact a company's ability to attract and retain talent. According to McKinsey, 52% of employees would prefer a more flexible workplace today, whether that's hybrid or fully remote. Another UK study found that 71% of workers want flexible work options to be made permanentand 66% of business decision makers are considering redesigning physical spaces to better accommodate hybrid work. Extreme flexibility and hybrid work options will define the future of work in the near future.
As mentioned previously, a digital workspace is the right blend of technology, processes, and work culture that fosters and encourages productivity no matter where employees work from. It's more than just moving workloads to SaaS applications or enabling corporate network access via VPN. Here are just some of the digital workspace components you need for a successful one at your company.
To support a digital workspace, your company needs a blend of several different technologies and approaches, such as:
To support a digital workspace, your company will also need to look at the human factors and develop strategies, processes, and procedures that work in combination with the technology. This extra work will help ensure your employees can be at their productive best while enabling the tech tools they need to do so.
Now that you see how a digital workspace is all about the right combination of technology and people, how can you create a digital workspace for your company? What steps do you need to take to create one that's right for your company today and can scale and change as your company evolves?
Business outcomes are measurable, quantifiable goals or objectives that your company wants to achieve. They help prioritise initiatives, provide direction, and clarify what success looks like at all levels. By building your digital workspace to support business outcomes, you'll avoid bolting new tech onto your existing workflows without assessing if they're relevant or useful.
When you build for business outcomes, you focus on delivering intentional, meaningful, and measurable results through seamless, integrated solutions. For example:
Employees will always want to know how the digital workspace affects them, their daily workload, and how they collaborate with colleagues. Taking an employee-first approach can help business leaders design a digital workspace more successfully because they'll have implemented the right tools that support the way employees work, improve cross-team productivity, and ensure everyone is working towards business goals.
For example, HR and IT teams spend a lot of time working on routine employee set up requests, so workflow-specific self-service tools can speed those processes and eliminate low-value admin tasks for them. Project and product managers spend a lot of time and effort searching for and gathering information for their distributed teams, so a centralised and cloud-based file storage application would save time and make it easy for the team to review relevant documents.
Since workflows and solutions don't fit into neat categories, it might be useful to categorise them according to how your company uses them. This way, it'll be easier to align technologies to workflows and ensure they're relevant for employees.
At this step, you're ready to choose the right technology to support your workflows. Before you jump into assessing new vendors, check your current tech stack to see if you already have the ones you'll need. Here's a quick checklist you can use for that:
Once completed, you'll know which tech you already have, which should be retired, which should be repurposed or retasked, and which you'll need to invest in.
Since a digital workspace is a human-centric work approach and, some would say, culture, it's critical to communicate the vision you hope to achieve and sustain with it. A good communication strategy is vital when transforming an existing companyinto a digital workspace, but it's good practice to continue communicating the vision regularly.
A successful digital workspace communication strategy:
Keeping the lines of communication continually open with relevant and honest communication shapes a more positive company culture by embracing employees more fully and ensuring their needs are always taken into consideration. It increases adoption of new tools and workflows by making change desirable for employees. It drives behaviour change by increasing transparency of every decision since employees will better understand how it impacts them. Open communication removes the friction that may exist between employees, teams, and even between employees and their workflows because everyone will have a clearly understanding of why things are being done the way they are done.
The more advanced a digital workplace is, the better it is at delivering business outcomes, positive work experiences, and effective use of technology. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't change if a new software application, workflow approach, or other improvement pops up at some point.
A digital workspace maturity model helps measure the progress of your workspaceso you can determine performance and effectiveness today and what changes you might need to make to enhance it later on. Here are 10 questions you can ask yourself or your company to asses where you are:
As companies move deeper into the fully-on digital workspace, they're aware of the need to have a good blend of technology and human experience. Successful digital workspaces are designed around the needs of the people in it, as they carry out the business of your company.
Creating the best digital workspace for your company takes planning, a good understanding of your processes, and the needs of your employees. Those that are able to get this done right will set themselves and their employees up for success. Whether it's the existing employees who enjoy coming to work every day or by being an attractive place for new employees to work.
If you're looking to create a successful digital workspacein your company, reach out to Redcentric today. We've developed a solid workspace solution that will enable a modern, flexible way of working for companies in today's digital world.