Kaizen: Continuously improving the employee experience through product centric strategy and data analytics
Leaders must invest in and leverage data to inform product centric strategies that enable employee growth.
The digitization thats occurred since 2020 has shone a spotlight on two challenges for Information Technology (IT) leaders and teams: an explosion of data and an employee digital skills gap that grows increasingly wide with every new software or service introduction. In highly competitive markets, enterprises compete primarily on the productivity and efficiency of their employee workforce. To maintain a competitive market advantage while fostering an innovative service culture, enterprise IT leaders must think and act differently (Miller, 2020).
With an overabundance of data and employees who are struggling to utilize the software and services available, it begs the question - where should leaders place their bets? How can IT leaders successfully steer their initiatives to success in an environment awash with management consultancy buzzwords and strategic snake oil? One bet many large organizations are placing in this new world of work is transforming legacy IT into a Digital Workplace (Cain, Gotta, 2020).
Digital Workplace - New name, same remit?
In the past legacy IT software portfolios used within large organizations took broadly two different forms. The first was custom built software, built on top of a database to fulfill a particular business process or customer need. The second was software that IT would procure, this would often take a significant amount of work to deploy - requiring servers to be bought and provisioned and people to be trained for support. IT teams would build up intranet sites from scratch using a content management foundation, now they use out of the box solutions.
What perhaps sets Digital Workplace apart from legacy IT is the way in which it approaches and rationalizes the portfolio of out of the box software tools along side the custom built software. The Digital Workplace has different DNA, it looks to play a larger more customer centric role within the enterprise. This amounts to Digital Workplace teams putting significantly more emphasis and ownership in delivering an employee experience (digital and physical) that is both simple and intuitive - enabled by the Digital Workplace portfolio.
Digital Workplace Portfolio Strategy and Landscape
The Digital Workplace facilitates a simple and intuitive experience by leveraging data generated from the portfolio to inform strategy, planning and execution. The competition from enterprise software vendors to have their product become part of an enterprise Digital Workplace portfolio is intense, largely because enterprise software is in the “Product” stage of technology evolution and in what Simon Wardley (2017) calls a state of “War”. Meaning, there is intense competition in multiple marketplaces as various companies – both big and small, established and emerging – competing to become part of the enterprise Digital Workplace portfolio.
This competition is so intense that it is no longer only the Digital Workplace department and leaders to which software companies are marketing. In 2008, Yammer started a trend that continues to this day of engaging directly with employees and attempting to get them to use a new product (Olp, 2018).
Licensing terms that start with freemium tiers and base their pricing on a per-user-per-month basis are attractive and lower the barrier for Managers to test. Vendors have aggressively expanded the value proposition and specialization of products available, helping them build a case for a niche employee need. If you were a manager in a business and you could improve the productivity of your team for eight dollars per user per month, wouldn’t you consider? This is the questions managers often ask when the Digital Workplace portfolio of software and services is not easy to use and provide clear value. A byproduct of a Digital Workplace portfolio that is not intuitive and easy to consume is the shadow IT portfolio - software not approve by IT for use within the enterprise. How can Digital Workplace teams deliver an easy and intuitive experience? Balance.
Blending generalized and specialized software and services
To articulate the complexities and nuance of managing the Digital Workplace portfolio, imagine a Digital Workplace based on Microsoft 365 – the Microsoft suite doesn’t do everything to all stakeholders’ satisfaction. Of course, Microsoft Teams(2022) has risen to meet the micro messaging challenge offered up by Slack(2022), and Igloo(2022) is a strong challenge to Yammer. However, Microsoft doesn’t really offer an out-of-the-box service desk product, leaving ServiceNow(2022) to rise. Microsoft 365(2022) and SharePoint Online(2022) lack the polish of a decent intranet, so perhaps the communication and change management teams will need to layer a SharePoint in-a-box solution over the top. It doesn’t include an enterprise grade wiki, so you’ll need Atlassian’s Confluence(2022) for the developers and software engineers will want Atlassian Jira(2022) for issue tracking. HR will want a core transactional employee and manager self-service system, such as Workday (2022) or SuccessFactors(2022), but that doesn’t cover Learning and Development (L&D) because they’ll have gone with Cornerstone(2022). Although Microsoft provides PowerBI (2022) for reporting and data visualization, it is likely that some teams are already quite skilled at using Tableau(2022) for this purpose.
Each of these products will be suited to a particular purpose - content collaboration, communication, teamwork - and likely tied together using single sign-on solutions.
Aha! has a tool specifically for product managers for $XX user/month; Midaxo(2022) has a collaboration and tracking platform specifically for mergers and acquisitions; the list of of specialists is exhaustive. These specialist digital workplace tools tend to be much more expensive, but sell on the promise that, if fully adopted and exploited by the specialists within the enterprise, they will save masses of time. This approach used to be called “best of breed” – selecting the most appropriate tool for a given requirement and being agnostic about the supplier.
Does the modern “best of breed” Digital Workplace just become a zoo?
It's evident from this example that the future of Digital Workplace management is to a large extent the management and exploitation of software and services - the adoption and maturity of those services, that help employees communicate, meet as a group, create and share knowledge. There will always be a balance to be struck between the pared down basic productivity platform, such as Microsoft 365, and peppering the organization with highly specialized tools. To capitalize on the strength and resources within the Digital Workplace portfolio, both generalized and specialized offerings, leaders should consider adopting models and frameworks that compliment this broader, experience centric remit.
Digital Workplace Resource List
Below is a curated list of resources related to Digital Workplace.To download all of the articles below click HERE
Gartner
Whit Andrews. Top 7 Insights from the 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey. Published April 21, 2021. ID G00741468.
Workers’ attitudes to digital technology and how it aids flexible work have evolved. Applications and software engineering leaders must offer combinations of software, hardware and services to meet workers’expectations that they work where they choose, when they choose and with software they choose.
Matt Cain, Melissa Hilbert, Federico De Silva, Daniel Barros. Observe, Measure and Assist: Three Emerging Ways to Drive Workforce Digital Dexterity. Published 26 October 2020. ID G00720023.
Application leaders can increase workers’ digital dexterity by using digital experience monitoring tools to observe enabling infrastructure, by implementing experience-level agreements to measure success, and by deploying digital adoption solutions to aid the development ofapplication competencies.
Matt Cain, Mike Gotta. Building Employees’ Digital Dexterity: A Key Capability for Future Business Success.Published 18 October 2021. ID G00760241.
Business models increasingly depend on the ability and ambition of the workforce to work digitally to drive better business outcomes. To ensure competitive advantage, executive leaders must build the next-generation workforce by boosting employee digital dexterity.
Gavin Tay, Achint Aggarwal. A Maturity Framework to Advance Digital Workplace Programs. Published: 22 February 2018. ID G00351182
A digital workplace program that delivers tangible, measurable value involves more than the prioritization of technology deployments. Application leaders should use this maturity framework to align their business, people and technology in pursuit of workforce digital dexterity.
Helen Poitevin. How to Harness Voice of the Employee Insights for Continuous Employee Experience Improvement. Refreshed 13 January 2021, Published 20 September 2019. ID G00450255
Application leaders supporting HCM technology for the digital workplace need to adapt their measurement and listening strategies when shifting focus from employee engagement to employee experience. New voice ofthe employee methods and practices are needed.
Mike Gotta, Christopher Trueman. Establish Social and Community Experiences as Essential Digital Workplace Capabilities. Published 24 August 2021. ID G00752165
Workstream collaboration tools are the everyday activity hub for remote workers, used not just for tasks butas an imperfect tool for social and community engagement. Digital workplace application leaders must apply these practices to improve social and community experiences in hybrid work.
Nikos Drakos, Simon Mingay. Introducing the Digital Workplace Strategic IT Services Portfolio. Published: 14 June 2017. ID G00325371
Establishing a connection between specific capabilities and business outcomes is an essential element ofa successful digital workplace program. Application leaders can use five digital workplace services, along with business value statements and relevant capabilities, to establish this connection.
Lane Severson, Michael Woodbridge, Tim Nelms, Christopher Trueman, Tori Paulman, Adam Preset, Craig Roth, Matt Cain. Predicts 2022 Digital Workplace Is Foundational for Employee Experience
Digital workplace applications play a crucial role in enabling digital dexterity and shaping employee experience. Our 2022 predictions highlight new trends and technologies that digital workplace application leaders should analyze as they optimize the digital employee experience.
Digital Workplace Group
Kevin Olp. Digital workplace adoption strategies: Proven approaches to bring users on board. Digital Workplace Group
You cannot force people to adopt something that doesn’t bring value to their lives in an easy-to-useformat. Employ user-centred design to ensure you build something that is easy to use.
Understand your audience and the different “tribes” within it. Develop specific approaches for each tribe, and decide how much time to devote to each (but don’t ignore any of them). Leverage early adopters as opinion leaders and the early majority as influencers and peer coaches.
Dr Lauren ‘L’ Vargas. Partnering with HR to digitally enable the employee journey. An integrated view. Digital Workplace Group
In a 2018 keynote address to the ReimagineHR conference, Gartner Group Vice President Brian Kropp urged organizations to: “Start focusing on user experience instead of self- service. Technology that deliversan effortless experience for employees and managers has a greater positive impact on performance than technology that offers on-demand access.” In this same address, Kropp warned HR executives that: “67%of their CEOs told us [Gartner] that if their organizations do not make significant upgrades to their digital capabilities by 2020, they will no longer be competitive.”
Kevin Olp. Employee experience: How digital workplace teams can enhance the employee journey. Digital Workplace Group
Employee experience is worker’s observations and perceptions about his or her employment at a particular company. Experience is often influenced by the company’s physical workspace, the work–life balance the company provides and technology that enables productivity.
Paul Miller. Decade of Courage Manifesto. DWG’s 12 action points for essential workplace transformation. Digital Workplace Group
Ensure hyper-resilient business continuity through advanced (and at times hyper-remote) digital workplaces for every employee and contractor.
Paul Miller. Decade of Courage Manifesto. Season 2 The year of change that matters. Digital Workplace Group
Enrich the value of physical meetings and co-working. In-person working will take on a near sacred importance while we also deepen and strengthen our digital working –creating a hyper- integrated work experience.