With global opportunities more readily available than ever before, and employees able to work anywhere thanks to remote work opportunities, the need to utilise an effective digital workplace has accelerated.
The more integrated your business is with workplace technology, the more flexible you can be in your employees’ experience and work life balance, which could help you attract the best candidates over your competition. Thanks to the array of digital workplace benefits, you’re also likely to be working smarter and more efficiently.
There are some significant advantages of operating in a digital workplace – rather than solely within a physical office space – include being able to evolve more quickly than competitors who do not work in the same technologically developed way. To clarify exactly what the digital workplace is and whether your business would be set to benefit from working in an online environment, read on below.
What is a digital workplace?
The theory behind creating a digital workplace came from the belief that companies needed to put their people first, taking into account the impact a digital transformation could have on the employee experience. Due to advances in technology, the notion of a digital workplace has now become a reality and further developments will continue to have an effect as the workplace evolves.
Moving into this way of working requires a considered digital workplace strategy. You'll also need a lot of management, time, and expertise as you’re moving from one way of working into a virtual work environment that coordinates people, processes, and technology more closely than ever before. The whole process must be proactively managed and designed so that your business is able to achieve the objectives it set by having a digital workplace, whether that’s to increase productivity, enhance employee satisfaction, or improve the customer experience.
What are the benefits of digital communication in the workplace?
So what are the benefits of a digital workplace? First and foremost, the technology offers businesses five capabilities that draw in core functions of the company and the way it operates. We explore these in more detail below:
- Improved internal communications: A digital workplace provides intuitive communication tools that increase employee engagement with your digital communication channels, such as company news feeds.
- Streamlined processes: Digital workplaces include analytics that allow business leaders to understand how their operations and processes are performing.
- Increased employee productivity: Thanks to self-service features like document management, holiday booking software, and e-learning courses, employees can benefit from an autonomous work environment that boosts productivity.
- Better work life balance: Implementing digital workplaces provide teams with the opportunity to work flexibility, whether that’s face-to-face or 100% remote work. This will promote a better employee experience, because staff will have more control over their work and leisure time.
- Improved collaboration: Collaboration tools enable dispersed teams to work on projects and tasks from afar.
By considering these five areas, you’ll be developing opportunities for your team to work in a more open, collaborative way which will increase the regularity and efficiency in which information is shared throughout your business. This will positively impact your customer services too, by helping your teams to solve issues quicker and respond more effectively to clients.
Utilising online intranet software will give your employees the digital communication tools they need to share information more easily throughout the business. It also improves communication in the workplace by giving staff a place to pose questions or raise challenges they’re facing, which could be solved by peers they’ve never spoken to before. Once employees start seeing and feeling the digital workplace benefits, they will feel more encouraged to work within a collaborative culture.
The digital workplace also opens up the ability you have as a business to offer flexible working, maximising the opportunity for employees to work in a style that suits them. As the world evolves into an increasingly global environment it also allows people the opportunity to work from anywhere, meaning as an employer you can attract talent from wherever they are in the world.
The same is true for your clients: with an online system available around the clock, your customers can capture updates and pose quick questions to your team without having to call across different time zones, or wait for an email response. Depending on the service or product you offer, you could also win business in different geographies, as all your interactions with your clients can take place digitally. Another digital workplace benefit is that all of your work is kept more securely, from customer information to business data. Your systems can be backed up in cloud technology, and you’ll always have an online record of activity. This means that everything you do is also trackable, which will help to improve accountability within the workplace, throughout your teams and departments. The overall impact of a digital workplace is that it’s more effective than an environment that is predominately offline.
