4 Ways to Elevate and Empower EVERYONE in the Modern Workplace

Last month, I launched my Business Intelligence series with a post about Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge being critical to a successful digital transformation. In this second post of the series, I want to look more granularly at the Modern Workplace, another crucial aspect of your Intelligent Business.

It’s no secret that the paradigm of business is changing in the digital age. Many companies are realizing their own potential through digital transformation, and much of that transformation takes place in company culture. This is where the modern workplace comes into play.

To give your workforce the tools and vision they need to be productive, innovative and successful, you need to commit to those cultural shifts yourself. Be open to experimentation, new ideas, and be prepared to listen to your employees and adjust to their productivity and work-life-balance needs, the same way you listen to your customer’s needs to solve their obstacles.

So what is the answer to this fluctuation? Intelligent business. Intelligent business is the concept driving change and transformation in enterprises across the globe. One of the key aspects of an intelligent business is a modern workplace. Furthermore, if you are a Microsoft partner, this is a critical component of realizing your piece of the $1.7 trillion opportunity that exists for cloud computing and services in the US alone!

There are a few tenets of a modern workplace which set it apart from its traditional counter-point. I’ll go into detail on some of them as well as talk about the larger paradigm shifts that go along with implementing these tenets.

Here are the basic concepts you’ll need solutions for, in order to maintain a modern workplace:

·      Strategies based on data

·      Actionable insights

·      Flexible workplace

·      Trusted platform

Now, let’s look at the challenges many companies face in transforming their workplaces’ cultural and digital environments, and what they can do about it.

1.      Strategies based on data and changing business models

Healthcare, retail, government, and industries across the board are shifting the paradigm of business to realize the biggest impact to their bottom line. Rather than one-and-done sales deals, many have already moved to subscription-based business models. On top of this, customers expect a different level of connection and support from the companies they purchase from. The customer experience needs to be proactive, iterative and agile. Businesses need to respond to customer needs quickly to serve them the best experience possible, despite fluctuating expectations.

Many companies’ biggest challenges with data come from a lack of transparency in their sources and the time required to build a strong foundation of data. The best organizations are hiring “customer success managers” to regularly look at the data, evaluate their strategy, and ensure their programs and services are correctly mapped to rapidly changing customer needs. This reduces churn, helps add new customers via referrals and ultimately helps their bottom line.

The Solution

Intelligent businesses no longer rely on plain instinct when making decisions. Modern workplaces are leveraging data to help make go-to-market decisions, innovation decisions, and even help them track their own productivity throughout the day to help them make decisions about how they can best prioritize their work days. The challenge here for leadership is that you can’t rely on your personal perspective anymore. While analyzing data still requires good instincts and business expertise, you must put aside your preconceptions and act on your data. This eliminates bias and allows for enhanced decision making.  

Additionally, many companies simply don’t know how to access the critical data needed to make informed decisions. I really like Satya’s comment from his Ignite keynote speech this year, when we are "using some of the latest technologies from natural language processing, to speech recognition, to machine reading and comprehension, we can start tackling some of those age-old challenges we've had with information discovery and information search." By implementing new technologies, uncovering valuable data to inform business decisions can be made much easier. However, accessing data is only the first step…

2.      Actionable insights and customer satisfaction

With many companies focusing on their data strategies, companies that don’t have the resources are falling behind in every department: from the production line to marketing. Enterprise companies are implementing transformative digital solutions into every phase of their business, to help them move towards intelligent business practices. These solutions allow companies to cost-effectively and safely innovate more, go-to-market faster and maintain ongoing relationships with customers at faster rates and with much more in-depth understandings of their markets and customers’ needs.

The Solution

Once you have good data, you must know how to understand and draw actionable next-steps from it. Half of the challenge is understanding, with visualization tools this feat has become much easier. Many solutions offer customizable, user-friendly dashboards where you can get a high-level look at the health of different aspects of your business, and track progress towards goals. Now, there are even technologies available which can give you prescriptive insights, suggesting next-steps based on previous and third-party data.

A big part of actionable insights comes from your customer insights. Using customer feedback and use-data, you can make key decisions to help your business grow. The cultural shift here is remaining agile. Some of this involves what you do with your infrastructure, but all of it has to do with your business processes. You have to be flexible so that, when the customer data is overwhelmingly pointing towards one direction or another, you’re ready to take action on it, and quickly. This helps customers know that you’re listening to them and you care about their experience with your company on every level.

3.      Flexible workplace that embraces democratized collaboration

Employees are increasingly working from home, or remotely. Many companies use contractors and freelancers to help with special projects or to get expertise in designated areas of their businesses. With so many moving parts, some companies struggle to maintain consensus and engagement when communicating with their disparate workforces.

The Solution

This is a large challenge for businesses, including our team here at Microsoft, as it’s a new phenomenon that changes the way we interact and work together. With an increase in remote employees, contractors and freelancers, organizations need to find new solutions for communication. While many have adapted to social networks and email as means of staying in touch with our friends, family, and colleagues, many workplaces do not have a central place to communicate nor comprehensive ways to brainstorm and have other important meetings from afar.

Again, technology can help, but a cultural shift is also needed here. To keep in touch with your remote employees and keep the company cohesive, HR must become internal, digital marketers and evangelizing to your company will take on a different form. Interacting online during meetings, between meetings and about projects and expectations will require similar agility in responding to situations at hand. This is where leadership needs to learn to listen to the needs of their employees and be flexible in accommodating their life situations. This outlook will help companies to attract and retain the top talent for their industries and stay competitive in their market.

4.      Trusted platform with advanced threat protection

Cybersecurity threats are pervasive and increasingly mature in sophistication. Every day, we see large companies of all sizes whom we’ve trusted for years, fall victim to cyber-attacks. The cybersecurity skills-shortage is at its peak and many companies don’t have the resources in their IT budgets to prioritize security solutions and experts the way they should. These potential cyber-attacks can compromise their employees’ and clients’ trust, their in-the-works innovations, and the organization’s reputation at large.

The Solution

A key element to modernizing your workplace is ensuring that you have an environment and infrastructure that is both agile and secure. These terms are often seen as contradictory to each other but, while nothing can be secure with 100% certainty, there are solutions that allow for extreme flexibility with heavy security controls included. Some of this will rely on internal cybersecurity and communications policies as well as organizational training. However, top solutions will provide device management, access management, advanced threat protection, data-loss prevention, regulatory compliance documentation, storage options and more much-needed security controls. These security controls allow your workforce to stay connected, all over the world, while minimizing the ability of cyber-attacks to compromise your network and sensitive data.

Conclusion

I’m so excited by the opportunity in front of us. As Microsoft evolves and continues on our digital transformation journey, I look forward to sharing more stories and best practices with you. I also love hearing how you’re advancing your own organizational goals through a digital transformation and a Modern Workplace.