3 Great Examples of the Modern Digital Workplace in 2017

While humans are still at the center of every workplace, they now rely on smart machines and software as their co-workers. The modern digital workplace brings together various technological platforms, tools, and solutions to help employees improve collaboration, mobility, and productivity at the workplace.

According to Deloitte, enterprises that implement robust online social networks see a 20% increase in employee satisfaction. They are also 7% more productive than organizations that have no social media tools that enable knowledge sharing across teams. 

The digitization of workspaces is unavoidable. That's why enterprises should start developing strategies for implementing a digital workplace right now.

To help you understand the benefits of implementing technological solutions that promote the digital workplace, here are three success stories from three different industries: banking, government, and retail. 

1. Mobile management strategy in banking

United is a $19 billion regional financial services company operating in 7 American states. To address the challenges accompanying its rapid growth, the organization was searching for a solution that would offer employees secure access to corporate data at any time and from any place.

United teamed up with Microsoft FastTrack team to build a cloud-based mobile-device management plan. United developed a mobile management strategy to allow employees work with the devices and apps of their choice while protecting company information. With its systems integration and collaboration features, the solution equips the bank with a secure path to future growth. 

2. Government teams collaboration

 Camara Municipal de Cascais governs the town of Cascais in Portugal and recently created a connected and mobile-enabled workplace to transform the paper-based, siloed organization into an agile digital workspace.

The organization aimed to improve employee mobility and productivity by enabling workers to manage their tasks with documents, email, and online collaboration software available from any device. All employees were migrated to Microsoft Exchange Online, connecting an entirely new segment of field workers to corporate email services.

Without any training provided, employees started using the new company intranet tool to create plans, assign tasks and set due dates, improving collaboration by 20% and completing group initiatives c. 7% faster. 

3. On-demand access to data in retail 

The retail environment is rapidly changing, and new digital platforms challenge the traditional ways of doing business. That's why the European subsidiary of the fitness brand ASICS decided to empower employees with the freedom to access and share data on demand.

ASICS introduced the “Modern Workplace” program promoting agility and productivity in the age where mobile-first is the new standard. The organization took advantage of the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) solution to create a secure mobile access to email and documents from anywhere on any device.

Employees who accessed company data while outside the network usually went through time-consuming multifactor authentication. Thanks to Azure Active Directory identity and access management capabilities, ASICS employees now enjoy simplified access to data with a single sign-on authentication or conditional access.  

Digital Workplace in the Middle East 

The modern workplace revolution is a global phenomenon present in the MEA region as well. Just have a look at these three local success stories from similar sectors:

●     Banking – One of Turkey’s most prominent financial services organizations, Türkiye Finans Kat?l?m Bankas? (TFKB) had a slow reporting infrastructure that prevented employees from making the most of incoming data. That's when TFKB turned to Microsoft Services and sharpened their business intelligence resources by allowing teams to reduce the time required for creating reports from hours to mere minutes.

●     Government – The Kuwait Ministry of Finance transitioned from a manual, paper-based system to a fully digital signature and document-management solution that supports the increasing mobility of ministry officials and staff. Combining Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 with Microsoft Office 365 did the trick – ministry employees can now review, manage, and sign relevant documents right on their mobile devices.

●     Retail – Saudi Airlines Catering Company (SACC) operated on a fragmented infrastructure that prevented timely response to changing business needs. In partnership with Microsoft, SACC developed an HR and finance platform available as a web service across divisions and moved employee emails to the cloud, equipping 900 employee devices with the Office 365 productivity suite to build a unified communications infrastructure for more natural collaboration.  

The future of digital workplace looks bright. Gartner predicts further digitization of the workplace with rising technologies such as AI or smart virtual assistants.

How can enterprises prepare for the future? The first step is keeping a close eye on the trends in society, business, and technology that will converge and change how we work. Start with Microsoft Productivity Vision to see which current technological trends are key to building collaborative, connected, and data-driven workspaces.

Have you got any experience with the digital workplace transformation at your company? Please share your story in comments to help the community learn about best practices that will become essential to building the digital workplaces of the future.

Are you interested in taking the first steps to implement a modern digital workplace at your organization? Don't hesitate to get in touch with me over inMails. I'm always looking for opportunities for transforming workplaces with technological solutions.