First Consumers, Then Employees: 4 Trends to Consumerize Your Digital Workplace

Gone are the days when IT departments were impenetrable fortresses within a company, places where "experts" met in an almost secret way to discuss strange terms and set up applications that would define the course of the organization.

Technologies have evolved at such a pace that the last major innovations have turned the authority of these IT departments upside down. Mobility, cloud, and social innovations, to name a few, are some of the trends that revolutionized our world. Companies were no longer the first primary users. Instead, consumers became the first people to use these technologies, and through their use they later influenced and defined innovations within companies.  

Today, corporate software and applications are used to solve or improve a process within an organization, and for that to happen, adoption of these tools is key to success. But in order to achieve that, these corporate software tools need to be part of the employees’ digital lives. Companies cannot continue in their old ways as if nothing happened. Nowadays it’s impossible to provide a platform to an employee and expect him or her to learn its operations through a manual. The individual employee, as a consumer, is used to applications that easily adapt to his or her life. At the same time these applications must engage them in a way that encourages the use of these newest developments. As a result, employees also expect the same quality from corporate tools.

With this revolution in mind, the concept of bringing consumerization to the company (or Enterprise Consumerization, as we like to call it) emerges in a new way. Teams and employees within organizations also need to be treated like digital consumers when they use corporate applications. Here are 4 key concepts that companies should consider in order to make corporate tools look like consumer software, and in order to drive better adoption:

1. Redesign User Experience: The use of corporate applications must produce the same daily satisfaction that users find on their own consumer apps. It’s crucial that the latest innovations in UX are identified and implemented.
2. Foster Friendliness: These interfaces must be intuitive, and simply understood without previous training. They must also be fast, and they must offer understandable results appropriate to the type of users who wish to easily leverage them.
3. Make it a Seamless Experience: No need of specific devices, operating systems or storage subsystems. No matter what device your team is using, where or when they are using it, the experience needs to be seamless, cloud-based, and omnichannel. Everything must be intuitive and natural.
4. Encourage Collaboration and Gamification Dynamics: In the corporate environment, social and integration tools must converge in order to promote greater participation. The gamification dynamics that have been so successful when connecting with consumers in a unique way can also be used for serious applications in order to achieve higher adoption and user motivation.

We live in times in which consumers rule, driven by ever evolving technologies. It is a democratic, open, and collaborative reign that pushes organizations to be better and to rethink their processes and systems. It’s in our hands to decide which way to go if we want to engage with our employees. Consumers don’t automatically become employees when they pass through the door of a company. They are still consumers, and they want to be treated as such.