Organizations are embracing technology to optimize individual and team productivity, collaboration, and the employee experience at large. The abrupt, COVID-19-driven shift to remote work as the default for much of the labor force has altered work as we know it—and with the work-from-home cat out of the bag, it could prove challenging to coax these professionals back to prepandemic levels of in-office work.
Source: Original Postress-this.php?">Rebooting the Digital Workplace
As organizations manage a growing number of offsite employees, many are beginning to accept the inevitability of a digital workplace where work is completed by a mix of onsite and remote workers that must operate in synchrony to meet business objectives.
Some leaders approach the prospect of the digital workplace with concerns related to productivity, relationship building and onboarding, development and learning, and impact on innovation. Yet companies may be able to overcome the digital workplace’s deficits and ambiguities by more intentionally embracing its positive aspects, including the data generated by workers’ tools and platforms. This can help organizations optimize individual and team performance and customize the employee experience through personalized recommendations, enabling remote work to be far more than a diminished proxy for the traditional office. And as onsite workspaces and headquarters evolve, organizations can use this data to create thriving, productive, and cost-effective offices that are seamlessly interwoven with the remote experience.
More Measurable, More Manageable
If it’s true that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, then the digital workplace is eminently manageable. Its technologies and tools can help employers gain insights ranging from individual employee performance to team-level productivity to companywide morale, enabling them to identify patterns and make predictions, nudge positive employee behaviors, and fine-tune individual, team, and organizational performance.
Enabling technologies include people analytics solutions that help deliver actionable insights on employee and team behavior and productivity, AI-driven personal productivity assistants and other AI technologies that use workforce data to make personalized recommendations to optimize performance, and workflow management solutions that streamline work processes and automate decision-making, actions, and responses. On the back end are strong cybersecurity solutions, such as zero trust architectures, along with hybrid and multicloud environments and services that support secure remote access and scale with flexing workloads.
On top of these foundational technologies, organizations can layer tools such as organizational network analysis, which is currently used to track organizational information flow. Such analysis can help gauge remote workforce connectivity—for example, identifying isolated employees and measuring interactions between and among teams.
Workplace social media can help teams tap into the power of the entire workforce, regardless of location, to generate ideas and collaborate, democratizing formerly privileged exchanges of ideas. New videoconferencing solutions based on virtual and augmented reality stand ready to enable persistent, simulated collaboration environments—such as those found in online video games—where users can meet, communicate, interact, and collaborate in a more natural-feeling setting.
Finally, a collaboration ecosystem strategy can help optimize technology investments in chat-based workspaces, video and phone conferencing, individual and team project and task management, whiteboarding and brainstorming, file-sharing and storage, and other tools. This can help enterprises curate these collaboration tools and seamlessly integrate, architect, and use them in a coordinated manner to reduce confusing or repetitive workflows and alerts. Not only can this improve team productivity, but it can also improve the quality of data and insights that help leaders better understand and manage their employees.
Measuring employees’ digital activity provides an additional opportunity for employers to lean into the ongoing move away from decision-making based on gut instinct and assumptions. Transparency about how they plan to use the data—and what they’re measuring and why—can help organizations manage privacy concerns. And rather than focus on individual performance, they can aim to identify and bend overarching trendlines by aggregating and anonymizing data.
Data Drives New Ways of Working
By understanding data and behaviors that most closely correlate with workplace success and failure, companies stand to improve work processes and create personalized employee experiences that lead to better engagement and outcomes. The most agile companies will investigate the patterns remote workers are encoding in data and use them to develop new ways of working and collaborating. As these emerging work patterns are standardized, the knowledge that can be extracted from them will become more precise and more valuable.
Employee engagement and well-being. In a remote situation, managers may be unable to readily identify employees who are at risk for low productivity or in danger of leaving. With data generated by the digital workplace, managers can identify employees suffering from emotional stress and burnout and proactively intervene to address such challenges as low engagement and lack of inclusivity.
Flexible workplace 2.0. Digitization unlocks a new era of workplace customization. Remote workforce data and predictive analytics can help organizations provide employees with high-quality, customized experiences—a mix of benefits, rewards, assignments, and learning based on personal experiences and tacit and explicit preferences. The digital coach of the future—enabled by organizational AI—could offer employees assignments predicted to be both interesting and skills-aligned.
Digital serendipity. Data generated by collaboration channels can map worker interactions and relationships, revealing informal structures that are often more influential than formal organizational design. For instance, it could identify workplace relationships to proactively develop or strengthen to foster serendipitous, cross-disciplinary connections that help drive innovation, while internal talent marketplaces can help connect employees with internal and external opportunities, mentorships, stretch assignments, and rotation programs and enable managers to find needed skills.
The Office Is Dead, Long Live the Office!
The office may not be dead, but it’s unlikely to return in its previous incarnation. Employers could find that creating exciting environments that employees are eager to experience is the best way to entice them back to the office. The smart money is on flexible and configurable work environments, technology-driven workplace services, and new ways of managing fewer people and less space without sacrificing collaboration and innovation. As the office evolves to become both a collaboration hub for project teams and a creative center for client meetings, employees can expect a hybrid work style that supplements working from home with targeted in-office experiences, especially for critical events such as onboarding.
These offices of the future will likely be infused with the same digital technologies and tools used in the remote workspace to more easily permit virtual, multidirectional collaboration with remote workers. Organizational AI can help teams organize the dates, times, and locations of in-office meetings to maximize the value of space and promote team interactions. And with good office design, companies can measure the impact of traditional office orthodoxies such as in-person conversations, water-cooler discussions, and spontaneous hallway encounters that generate real business value. Yet the ROI will likely be more carefully examined than in the past.
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In the wake of the mass forced adoption of remote work, many organizations are considering how to configure and manage a digital workplace in which work is completed by both remote and onsite workers. The data generated by workers’ tools and platforms can help organizations fine-tune individual productivity and team performance, deliver customized employee experiences, and optimize the use of office space. As employees return to the office, this data can also help remote and onsite teams work in concert and ensure the parity of remote and in-office employee experiences.
—by Steven Hatfield, principal and Global Future of Work leader; and Robin Jones, principal U.S. Workforce Transformation leader, both with Deloitte Consulting LLP