The Digital Workplace Reimagined A historic shift in the future of work

Elevating the human experience to unlock productivity+ (A Deloitte / Gartner article)

People are first, then processes and technology:

"When COVID-19 became a crisis in early 2020, work for the entire workforce changed. For knowledge workers, offices shuttered, and they headed for home. Nurses, retail employees, factory workers, and beyond experienced overnight changes to their work routines. Historically, a dramatic productivity slowdown would have occurred; however, this was different. Organizations shifted their operations. In many cases, the result was virtual-first operations, and day-to-day business carried on.

This accelerated the use of digital solutions. As an example, although virtual conferencing wasn’t uncommon pre-COVID-19, many companies had to upgrade their infrastructure to enable offsite usage. Healthcare providers expanded their telemedicine capabilities. Grocery stores boosted their investments in online ordering.

Since then, many have hailed the digital workplace as a solution to everything from business continuity to workforce engagement and retention. Some organizations are betting big on the future of virtual work and new ways work working. Others have accepted that some mix of in-person and remote work is here for the long haul resulting in the need to consider changes to the physical and digital workplace, invest in new skills, and establish new working norms. And for the non-office worker, organizations are investing in solutions that simplify work through digital enablement and automation (e.g., factory workers side-by-side with highly sophisticated automation, and retail workers with handheld devices that enable everything from product information to customer support). Whether in-person or remote, workers in all types of work benefit from seamless digital workplace solutions to enable the future of work.

That’s fine with workers. For many, flexible work-from-anywhere policies have even become table stakes for accepting or staying in a job. A recent Morning Consult poll for Bloomberg revealed that 39% of U.S. adults would consider leaving their jobs if remote work were no longer an option, a share that rises to 49% among millennial and Gen Z employees.1?What about asking workers to give up some compensation in exchange for location flexibility? Think again: In another survey, 83% of employees say they would quit if their employers paid less for remote work than for onsite work.2?And for greater bottom-line results, organizations need to think about humans and technology working together across all types of work.

Hidden costs in fragmentation

The implication is that for a sizeable swath of the knowledge workforce, their digital experience is their workforce experience. Further, in today’s world digital tools are used to connect the complete workforce. But in a hyperconnected world where workers may affect market performance as much as customers do, many organizations have not yet addressed how their workforce can carry out their work optimally – and how that affects their outlook – in the digital environment provided for them. The numbers tell the tale:

• Most workers toggle between apps?10 times an hour, costing organizations?32 days per worker, per year?of workplace productivity3
• Employees spend?25% of their time?looking for information they need to do their jobs4
• Knowledge workers spend?40% of their time?on work about work. That's 800 hours times 1.25 billion knowledge workers, equaling?a trillion hours per year5

That seems counterintuitive given all the applications, communication channels, and collaboration tools that have sprung up to support more digital ways of working. Today, most employers have any number of digital solutions operating across the organization. But many of these solutions have duplicative features, and the ecosystem is becoming harder for workers to navigate. More concerning, there’s little evidence these solutions are moving the needle on workforce productivity. Instead, workers may confront an incoherent workforce experience, often echoed by a disconnect in priorities.

Productivity+ refers to the range of business outcomes that a modern digital workplace enables. These include productivity as well as innovation, inclusion, connection, collaboration, purpose, engagement, and beyond.

Reimagining the digital workplace

It turns out that there’s more to the digital workplace than simply providing workers with online access to office applications. Although most organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work – no small accomplishment under the adverse circumstances they were dealing with – for many this was a surface-level, technology-driven change. In other words, it was business as usual overlaid with piecemeal digital solutions. As stated in Gartner? Hype CycleT?6?for the Digital Workplace, “This rapid escalation of digital work has been transformational, and most organizations are anxious to keep the momentum going.”7

It turns out that there’s more to the digital workplace than simply providing workers with online access to office applications.

Meanwhile, key tensions have cropped up that affect the very nature of work. Organizations are investing in technology to augment human capabilities, but far fewer are investing in workers’ long-term development or organizational changes required for humans to effectively collaborate with smart machines. This is critical to organizational resiliency in a world where the only constant changes.

The common thread through all of this is the worker. To go from?looking?digital to?living?digital, the workplace must be redesigned to operate in synchrony and connect all workers to those that they work with when, where, and how they need it – regardless of location, device, or time zone. Making the shift requires connecting worker experience to business outcomes. By putting workers at the center of the design, it becomes possible to create a digital workplace that transforms how people collaborate, get work done, and do business.

What humans want from digital interactions

1. Recognize me as my whole, real self – including my personal preferences, ambitions, and needs
2. Anticipate my needs, serve them before I express them, and embed collaboration and learning in the flow of my work
3. Open doors to working from anywhere through one-stop access to the tools I need to do my job
4. Listen to me and incorporate my feedback in a timely manner through real, transparent, and trustworthy solutions
5. Activate new mechanisms for boosted productivity and innovation, equipping me with reliable tools that feel tailored to me"