Three ways to make the digital workspace easy to use
The job market is the hottest it has been for years. Organizations need to stay in front of this in order to retain and attract talent, which is why it’s now a high priority in every boardroom. One of the key elements to win the war for talent is supporting employees with a cutting-edge digital workspace, which should be easy to use, with well-supported policies and practices, and a strong emphasis on adoption. Yet, many employees are underwhelmed by their current workspace experience.
A recent Gartner study showed that workers currently spend a lot of time navigating data jungles.
- 68% of employees must regularly switch between different applications
- Employees change context 400 times a day
- 20% of time spent searching for the right information
It makes perfect sense that employees are frustrated with their workspace with time-wasting productivity barriers and day-to-day complexities.
The origin of complexity
As organizations change and evolve, so too will their workspace needs. It becomes apparent that traditional workspace solutions – designed from a purely technical perspective – do not have all the necessary capabilities to support modern organizations. Over the years, the common strategy has been to tackle this problem by adding a new technical layer for each new business requirement or failure. A short-term fix that caused increasing complexity and long-term problems.
Employees saddled with these complex legacy systems are unproductive and unhappy since it’s hindering their daily work. To improve employee experience and productivity, you should make sure that the digital workspace facilitates employees with the right information and applications in an easy and intuitive way – regardless of device and location.
These three ways will help you conquer the workspace complexity.
1. Technology
Current digital workspace solutions must deal with both legacy and cloud solutions, making it difficult for employees to figure out where they can locate applications and where their data is stored. Applications can be installed locally, in the cloud, or through a Remote Desktop Solution. As a result, documents can be found locally, on a single drive, on SharePoint, in Teams, or remotely. It’s really not that surprising that employees are confused and productivity and employee experience are decreasing.
Implementing a digital workspace that puts the employee at the center of the solution can help you overcome most challenges. That’s why we introduce a portal-based digital workspace. By implementing a workspace portal as a single-entry point, employees are able to access all relevant and required applications, data and information they need to do their jobs effectively.
To enhance productivity and engagement the digital workspace portal is accessible regardless of the device they are working on. Whether your employees choose to use a smartphone, tablet or pc the digital workspace provides them with all information in a consistent way with the same look and feel. Your employees will no longer notice the difference between working with a local, legacy or cloud application because all applications are directly accessible in the portal. And since the content of the portal is role-based and can be adapted on an individual basis, employee satisfaction and productivity will improve.
2. Employee adoption
The ideal digital workspace is a workspace which:
- improves productivity
- facilitates easy sharing of knowledge within the organization
- refines process support by providing the right applications
- drives collaboration across departments, industries and countries
- boosts employee happiness
To achieve these desired outcomes it’s all about implementing technology in the right way to make sure it will meet the expectations and requirements of your employees.
Your investment in new digital workspace technologies will fall short of expectations if your employees do not believe that they’ll improve how they work. Putting your employees at the center of your design process will help them to adopt and embrace the full potential of their new workspace.
Creating personas is often the first step in building relevant and meaningful scenarios. Personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a group of users within your organization. Find out what motivates and demotivates these personas, what their high-value activities are and what they need to do their job effectively.
Personas are quite valuable in determining what your employees expect from the digital workspace, as well as how you can best inform, guide and assist them in adopting the new way of working and achieving your objectives.
3. Policy & Processes
Once again, it’s all about putting the employee at the center. Make sure they experience a smooth transition to their new environment, after all, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. But it doesn’t stop there. To further improve your employee experience you need to review your policies and processes close to the digital workspace. Revise them, simplify them and make sure they are user-friendly.
Every organization should at least reconsider its device’s onboarding strategy. A device is mostly the first point of contact with the digital workspace, so it’s necessary to make a good first impression. Therefore onboarding should be a truly out-of-the-box experience, whether it’s a new device (for a new hire) or a replacement. Make sure that your employees merely need to unpack their devices, connect them to the internet and the onboarding of the device is finished automatically. Such a seamless experience will have a huge positive impact on employee experience!