The Future of Work – Addressing the Needs of a Modern Workforce Leveraging Digital Workplace Solutions

As the global workforce continues to operate across hybrid workplaces, companies must find ways to cultivate a strong employee experience without the aid of shared spaces and physical touchpoints. Defining a future-oriented digital workplace strategy is the cornerstone of a company’s success; an effective strategy manifests how traditional ways of working will be reinvented not only structurally, but also in terms of culture, workplace, and technology-use.

Employees’ needs pertaining to their (digital) work environment have changed since the COVID-19 pandemic and keep evolving. Organizations must create adaptable, flexible, and hybrid workplaces capable of responding to the evolving needs and expectations of their employees. Leveraging new digital workplace solutions with associated organizational change is key to providing a connected and digital employee experience (DEX).

To understand the impact of the above-mentioned changes on the nature of work, we assess their relevance across three key workplace dimensions – People, Organization, and Technology. The following framework integrates current market trends and changing employee needs along these three dimensions.

People – How can organizations provide an environment in which employees can thrive and have meaningful human interactions?

• Culture of belonging and transparency: For organizations to attract new talent and retain their existing workforce, they must evolve; they must address the need for belonging and establish a culture that makes employees feel safe and supported in a digital environment.
• Reward and recognition: Rather than just appreciating praise for the result, employees desire a showing of appreciation for the effort invested and their unique and specific attributes contributing to an engagement’s overall success.
• Collaboration and communication: Increased distance between employees resulting from hybrid and remote working models made it more difficult for employees to collaborate effectively. This resulted in an increased focus on ensuring cross-functional teams are enabled to collaborate effectively and efficiently through new technologies in their workplace.
• Efficient knowledge management/ease of access to information: The shift to digital workplace solutions highlighted the challenge of maintaining an efficient knowledge exchange, as conversations and documents became increasingly scattered and siloed across systems. There is a need for more centralized and efficient knowledge management platforms, integrating systems and knowledge repositories, accessible to employees from anywhere.
• Learning and self-development: The degree to which companies provide comprehensive training and support resources to help employees enhance their skills and knowledge contributes to the organization’s overall success. Employers need to invest in their people and begin providing advanced features such as personalized learning and development plans, leveraging digital learning platforms to improve engagement and ensure the retention of their employees.
• Accessibility: Across all industries, employers need to consider the accessibility of their workplace for people with disabilities. With the increased remote work resulting from the pandemic, accessibility has expanded to include physical working spaces and inclusive and accessible technologies.
• User-friendly and user-centered approach: The level of exposure most people have to high-quality user experiences across varying technologies in their daily lives has a prominent spill-over effect; employees expect their workplace technologies to keep up with the pace of technologies they have at home. Digital workplace solutions must be user-centered and should help employees connect, engage, learn, deepen knowledge, and get work done in the most efficient way possible.
• Personalized employee experience: Employees expect their company to provide a digital employee experience tailored to their needs, providing access to the resources and tools relevant to their roles, responsibilities, and preferences.

Organization – How can organizations create an empowering place of work?

• Adapt policies supporting hybrid working: Although it is still too early to assess the long-term societal impact of hybrid working models, initial reports suggest that increased flexibility leads to increased worker happiness and higher productivity.
• Measure performance (improve people analytics): People analytics can improve how organizations identify, attract, develop, and retain talent, enabling them to better understand the drivers of engagement within and outside the organization. The pandemic played a role in accelerating the implementation of advanced people analytics. Leaders identified people analytics as an opportunity to make quick, informed, and strategic decisions concerning the workforce.
• Integrate the needs of employees continuously: Organizations must develop two-way communication channels, supported by relevant technology platforms, to gather and consolidate people data and to generate actionable measures to improve the (digital) employee experience continuously.

Technology – How can organizations implement relevant digital workplace solutions to propel themselves toward a Digital Workplace?

• System integration (shift from siloed to connected): Organizations aim to streamline the integration of various systems into one user interface, making it easier for employees to complete their tasks, share relevant information, and exchange seamlessly with colleagues from anywhere across any device.
• Flexible device policy (mobile support): Although not a new concept, the implementation of ‘Anywhere, Anytime, Any Device’ policies was more rapidly adopted by laggard organizations due to the pandemic. The basic concept is to empower the workforce by offering them a secure digital workplace accessible from anywhere with any device, including the employee’s personal devices.
• Security: With a more distributed workforce accessing corporate re-sources from remote locations, there is a strong need for robust security and end-point management solutions. Organizations that have not provided their employees with adequate collaboration tools and applications run the risk of their employees relying on unprotected personal devices and applications to facilitate the exchange with colleagues.
• Increase self-service capabilities: The advancement of digital workplace solutions has led to a shift from traditional support-service-provisioning within organizations to a model focused on employee autonomy and what is commonly referred to as employee self-service. Self-service empowers employees to perform functions such as updating their personal information, requesting time off, and accessing HR resources themselves.

Conclusion:

Organizations need to embrace new ways of working to remain competitive and adapt to the needs of their employees, providing a leading DEX. To improve the overall DEX leading organizations have begun to implement an entirely new working environment, integrating the technologies employees use (e-mail, instant messaging, enterprise social media tools, HR applications, and virtual meeting tools. This collection of previously siloed systems in one collective platform is known as the People Experience Platform (PXP). Managers will play a leading role in shaping the employee experience in the workplace of the future (see our “Future of Work” report that evaluates new hybrid working models made possible by digitalization). The workplace of the future will not only require greater attention to habits and processes that we once took for granted, but also a reimagining of what it means to collaborate with one another on a daily basis. The organizations that succeed in creating flexible, inclusive, and efficient workplaces will be those that approach the future of work holistically and systematically while developing a culture of collaboration in transparency to reap the rewards of new digital workplace solutions.