Businesses’ interest in the digital workplace—a highly efficient work environment enabled by a tailored suite of tools for mobility, communication, and data exchange—experienced a significant surge in 2020 when COVID-19 forced companies to embrace home offices. By 2021, 80% of workers globally were using collaboration tools to maintain productivity and efficiency in their workplaces.
By 2023, digital workplaces have undergone a number of changes—from enabling cloud computing for real-time data sharing to leveraging the metaverse for corporate training. At the same time, organizations still face challenges in digital workplace transformation—95% of employees confess they keep experiencing friction using virtual office essentials. This is a crucial roadblock for companies that aim to boost performance and scale up.
With transformation being the enabler of businesses’ success and organizations planning to spend $4.5 billion on technology by the end of the year, enabling efficient future-forward digital workplaces is a #1 priority for companies striving to gain a competitive edge.
How to approach digital transformation in the workplace and make it right? Let’s figure it out.
Why your digital workplace requires transformation
9 out of 10 companies that partner with Trinetix seek a transformation due to business growth, new challenges, and new opportunities. They may strive for automation, operational efficiency, or better data processing. One way or another, the target is the same—growth and scaling with progressive effectiveness.
Company growth is the key driver for digital workplace transformation. In today’s competitive environment, a workplace is the remote control of your organization. This means that to guarantee teams’ high productivity and continuous commitment, every button needs to work properly and deliver the expected results.
So, how to recognize when your digital workplace is not efficient enough and requires transformation?
The scope of work changes and the team grows
To maintain efficiency and comply with growing requirements and responsibilities, digital workplaces should become result-oriented, while at the same time—ensure seamless collaboration and ultimate flexibility.
64% of employees would like to see their company spend money on better technology in the office.
Data volume grows
The company is looking for a more efficient way to access, store, and process information. To ensure precision and data consistency, companies need to make the information available in real time and reinforce the approach to data security.
74% of security executives claim information security procedures and controls have become more complex in the past few years.
The speed of work grows
The organization can no longer afford to spend time on manual workflows and needs to automate routine processes to let employees focus on key impact-driving tasks. Any legacy process should be optimized to avoid business lagging behind.
88% of businesses claim that automation has made their businesses competitive and allowed them to achieve better results.
Employees appear under pressure and the quality of work goes down
Internal employee satisfaction directly impacts the quality of products and services delivered. That’s why to get desired results, companies should prioritize eliminating digital friction and improving engagement among employees by creating people-centered digital workplaces.
Companies with high employee engagement are 22% more profitable, yet only 33% of employees feel engaged at work.
Business objectives change and expectations become higher
In most cases, companies need to deliver better outcomes and aim to find the right tools to drive productivity, transforming digital workplaces into more efficient and sustainable work environments.
79% of employees working in collaborative environments feel well-prepared to adapt to emergent business challenges.
When is the right time to approach workplace transformation?
Typically, there are two scenarios when businesses decide to transform their digital workplaces.
- To prevent things from getting wrong
- When things get wrong
Of course, embedding workplace transformation into your general business strategy, thus proactively approaching any changes and drawbacks, would be an ideal plan. But often the transformation is forced and is rather a matter of business survival than an option.
Does it mean that it’s wrong to approach digital workplace transformation on the go? Our experience claims it’s the other way around. Let’s see how the transformation works in both cases.
As you see, the goals and objectives of digital transformation of the workplace and the moment you choose to get started do not influence the transformation flow. The second scenario, however, entails severe financial and operational risks, as companies need to take extra steps to disconnect employees from their tasks, re-collect requirements, get feedback, and make adjustments on the go.
As a result, businesses are bound to additional time and effort to get the same return. While acting proactively will result in creating sustainable business environments and allow organizations to focus on product growth.
Ready to supercharge your teams' productivity with an innovative digital workplace?
How to leverage digital workplace transformation initiatives
As a rule, before considering digital workplace transformation services, organizations carry out an in-house strategic analysis. Some companies we work with use the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) technique to identify the pain points they aim to address and define the main focus of the transformation.
In other cases, companies tend to address specific workplace issues that present a challenge at a particular moment.
Digital workplace transformation steps
When the challenges and objectives of digital workplace transformation are defined and validated, it’s important to decide on the steps to address them.
At Trinetix, we leverage the discovery-first approach to innovation, that’s why, launching a transformation, we start with in-depth research to uncover deeper dependencies and opportunities before implementing specific solutions.
To make sure users’ goals and expectations are covered, we harness an open feedback-gathering culture and make improvements a regular part of the transformation process.
- Analyzing company structure, processes, and current tech strategy to discover key areas of improvement and identify the departments that would be the first to embrace transformation.
- Formulating and validating the hypothesis to restate specific challenges that exist within each department that is due for the transformation; identifying the actions and tools needed to address the challenges in practice.
- Delivering and implementing dedicated digital workplace transformation solutions by providing support to employees adopting the changes and cultivating a strong feedback-sharing culture.
- Gathering users’ feedback and business’ changing priorities to work on solution improvements; tracking core KPIs to enhance employee productivity and improve business outcomes for competitive advantage.
- Enhancing the provided solutions by adding new features, adjusting existing ones, and considering the use cases that were not initially covered; continue monitoring the impact on the business.
Barriers to workplace transformation
For years of digital partnerships, we met dozens of hesitations about workplace transformation. At the same time, the overall uncertainty about the outcomes of a digital workplace boils down to the need to implement a holistic transformation strategy as a way to accelerate innovation adoption and deliver predicted outcomes.
Among the common barriers to implementing digital initiatives are:
- Insufficient digital dexterity and employee pushback
- Misalignment between the company's leadership
- Lack of innovation-ready digital infrastructure
- Acknowledging overall financial and reputational risks
With each of the above points being valid for workplace transformation, overcoming them is only possible with a consistent approach.
Aiming to overcome the barriers, we recommend taking one step at a time —to further validate the results with workplace users and measure the impact these changes are having on business. This will allow companies to optimize transformation efforts and better address business needs.
What is the real impact of digital workplace transformation?
While workplace transformation primarily aims to improve employee productivity, its results appear at three key business levels.
- The employee acts precisely, keeps in focus all essential things, gets faster access to the necessary data, delivers better results, and can dedicate more time to professional growth and improvement for the sake of the team and the client.
- The team gets the necessary assets for onboarding, training, better collaboration, and day-to-day activities. As a result, they start solving their tasks more efficiently and feel more satisfied doing their job.
- The company reduces financial and reputational risks, benefits from increased employee productivity, and can see an objective picture of company operations. As a result, the company focuses on business growth and overall strategy.
- The clients achieve better outcomes granted through automation, faster responses, wider services, and the company’s holistic control over product quality. As a result, they become loyal brand advocates and help businesses grow.
In the long run, the impact of digital transformation in the workplace is measured by liberated hours of work, reduced number of customer claims, enhanced teams’ efficiency and accuracy, and improved employee net promoter scores. That being said, with well-thought-out digital workplace transformation you always get more.
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As a trusted transformation partner, Trinetix helps forward-thinking leaders achieve their competitive edge by empowering their workforce with innovative productivity, engagement & collaboration-enabling tools and technologies. If you want to unlock opportunities for business growth through digital workplace transformation—let’s chat about creating next-gen experiences together!
