What’s Next For Your Digital Workforce?

Originally posted on our content site Beyond Business Buzzwords and written by Sam Button, Head of Growth at Roar Media.

One of the things that resonates through all digital transformation journeys is that digital innovation will never stop, there is always a ‘what’s next’. Many companies have recently been forced to rapidly roll-out provisions to enhance their digital workplace in order to maintain productivity and service through the pandemic. The building blocks have been in place mostly, but agility has been paramount to allow the workforce to become fully digital. This then presents a need to evaluate these new ways of working, collating feedback from employees and strategizing for the new normal and the future of the digital workforce.

Congratulate your team and celebrate achievements

Events in 2020 were completely unpredictable, there has never been a time in modern business or society where all industries needed to be agile and embrace a digital workplace. However, even digital teams have been surprised how well their organisation has reacted, enabling quick innovations to ensure the business ecosystem was manageable & productive whilst employees are operating in a remote environment.

Looking back at these successes, it is clear that digital innovation has enabled this process to be seamless for a number of companies. If the pandemic happened 25 years ago, there would have been no provisions to work from home, without laptops & the internet. Even technology in its relative infancy have been taken for granted including cloud computing & remote access. However, where companies have thrived is within very recent technologies and intranet innovations; our call centre, access to our documents & seamless communication within our teams has all become remote.

Now more than ever, the strategic enterprise advancements that enable a fully functioning digital workplace should highlight the importance of your digital team. All the projects which digital architects have been working on for years are now truly underpinning every organisation and allowing them to survive and thrive in a new & unprecedented era.

Analyse & Regroup

Whilst the majority of systems & infrastructure was in place to be agile through the crisis, many initiatives & necessary innovations had to be fast tracked in order to maintain productivity. A vast number of digital products have been implemented without testing, as they were deemed business critical. Digital teams have been taking on feedback & making improvements whilst these systems & products are in use.

This has been largely successful, however, there is a necessity to analyse how the digital workplace & current infrastructure has performed under the stresses of a fully remote working environment. It is also vital any new systems and system improvements are assessed and formally tested.

Rapid agile development has unearthed new ideas for enhancing your digital workplace, it is important to understand what this has taught and how this can be harnessed for future improvements.

Feedback & Involvement

One of the biggest challenges facing digital transformation projects for the past few years is getting the right buy in from employees and end users, shifting the culture to be adopters of digital innovation. The recent digital adoption was forced but meant that people were less reluctant to accept a digital workplace.

Having a number of digital allies within all areas of your organisation makes both small and large digital innovation projects much more palatable from top to bottom. It is good to engage with all areas of the business to discover their thoughts on how their roles adapted to the change and involve them in any future designs.

Listen to the feedback internally to form a new digital strategy that enhances the user experience for both your customers and your workforce to enable a better customer experience, a happier workforce and increased productivity. Increasing employee engagement with your digital strategy and allowing staff to see the importance in continued digital evolution.

Best practice

Some stresses of a new working environment are less obvious but need to be properly assessed to ensure you have the correct digital strategy to continue working within a remote environment. You need to ensure your remote workplace & digital workforce has several key elements that enable this to be fully functioning, resistant to any future stresses and cost effective.

Central Management – Being able to centrally manage what employees have access to, is key in maintaining a secure working environment. Employees with the right permissions require instant access to the right information, data, applications & documents.

Security – Cyber security is as important now as ever, with employees working remotely, companies need to know if their machines or internal cloud systems have been compromised. With unsecure networks and hardware being more difficult to track, this is something that needs to be assessed and stress tested.

Digital Leadership – Managing teams has evolved, there is a need to provide an agile environment which supports the remote management of teams, infrastructure and access. Cultivating a supportive digital culture relies on the correct systems & applications to provide an optimal employee experience.

Remote Collaboration – Companies are built on their employees, the environment needs to enable collaboration and maintain efficiency & productivity. It is important to ensure all teams and departments are supported, all data is still being collated and accessible to all. Projects managed by different teams have different requirements & often require unique software, no part of an organisation can be neglected to ensure a cohesive digital workplace.

The Future of End User Computing – Is your infrastructure capable to deal with the pressures of remote working for long durations. What is the optimal way for new starters to access what they need in an seamless manner, how can we ensure all systems are up to date and working cohesively with reports being managed centrally to ensure the infrastructure is operating optimally, securely and is cost effective.

We are hosting a half day Digital Workforce Innovation Online Conference on September 10th sponsored exclusively by Google Chrome Enterprise The interactive event will cover key topics effecting the digital workplace in this new era, gathering Europe’s finest IT & digital workplace leaders to discuss workplace innovation, digital leadership and the future of work.

The event is for digital & IT leaders. Follow the link to request to attend or find out further details of the event.