Why Digital Workplaces Fail (and how to succeed by investing in people)
Imagine you’re hosting a massive New Year’s Eve party.
And you invest a huge amount of attention, time, and energy into the perfect party setup. You’ve arranged sophisticated ambient lighting. Your deep house playlist has been curated obsessively over months. The imported craft lager is perfectly chilled to a crisp 2°C. You got a new beanbag for the chill room.
But you forget to think about your actual guests!
You forgot to include your address on the invite so everyone arrives after midnight. You don’t introduce people to each other to help them feel at ease. No one knows if it's shoes on or shoes off. They had no idea it was fancy dress so there’s one person in a hoodie and another dressed like Napoleon.
Quiz time: was your party a success? No!
(I mean, apart from the deep house, which was obviously on point).
But seriously—your party will fail if you ignore the one thing that it is actually about: people.
And that’s why digital workplaces just aren’t working for many businesses. They forget it’s not ultimately about technology, but about human beings.
Adoption is low, confusion is high and the subsequent chaos is a massive drag on organisational effectiveness (translation: your party guests aren’t having fun!).
According to research by 1E, 54% of organisations think their digital employee experience needs a “complete overhaul” or “significant improvement”. Employees spend 5 hours a week just looking for the information they need. And 29% of businesses directly correlate poor digital experiences with employee churn.
In our experience, the core issue is simple, if challenging: businesses put far too much focus on the technology aspect and nowhere near enough on the people aspect.
It’s almost always an 80% focus on technology and 20% on people.
So, for example, they’ll install a new video collaboration technology, but won’t give people much support to actually use it effectively. They’ll make big changes, but won’t clearly communicate why the changes have been made. They’ll spend months deploying new tools, but won’t take the time to ask what people actually need beforehand. They’ll test that the technology works technically, but not whether users are using it effectively.
We will never get tired of saying it: providing digital tools is not enough! People will not use technology effectively (no matter how good it is) unless they’re properly enabled and supported to do so.
If that enablement is not in place then the technology—and hence the digital workplace as a whole—will inevitably fail.
And these failures are seriously impacting the bottom line.
The cost of not investing in people
According to 1E’s research, 68% of enterprise organisations state that digital employee experience has a “high or critical” influence on revenue.
Indeed, research by the Harvard Business Review showed that a strong employee experience helped a global retail brand increase revenue by over 50%.
By deprioritising the people aspect of the digital workplace, you’re creating a massive blockade against the free flow of business value through your organisation.
The digital workplace is the heart of everything that happens in your organisation. Without it, your people can’t effectively find information, collaborate, or build relationships with each other.
Imagine if there was no digital workplace at all. People wouldn't know where or how to find each other. They wouldn't be able to share documents or work together. There would be much less awareness, rapport, and social cohesion between teams. People would struggle to find out what the strategy of their own company is!
Your people must be the priority. The technology and everything else follows from there.
A new mindset is needed that focuses 80% on people and 20% on technology.
If you have great digital tools and you are fully supporting your workforce to transition to those tools, learn how to use them effectively, and answer any queries they might have, you have the formula for a radically successful digital workplace.
How do you invest in your people?
So how do you support your workforce in this way? After all, the digital workplace in most organisations is a sprawling, complex beast with many moving parts.
At Future Worx, we simplify the issue with the three essential aspects of the digital workplace: coordination, collaboration, and community.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these…
Coordination
We define coordination as different teams pulling together towards the same goals.
This manifests when there’s high visibility of key people and information across the business. The relevant technology here is the intranet (or employee hub), which enables people from across the business to see what other teams are doing and coordinate with them effectively.
This might look like highly-personalised employee experiences that help them find the right information without having to ask.
Collaboration
We define collaboration as people coming together to deliver something of value.
Productivity is deeply rooted in human collaboration. The more frequently it occurs, the better the business outcome. But you can’t just make it happen by increasing salaries or putting more money into technology.
According to an article on collaboration in the Harvard Business Review: “Under the right conditions, large teams can achieve high levels of cooperation, but creating those conditions requires thoughtful, and sometimes significant, investments in the capacity for collaboration across the organization.”
The technical aspect of this centers on tools like MS Teams or Slack, which streamline workflows and allow for deep integration of tools and information across the business.
Community
We define community as a sense of shared culture, belonging, and purpose.
This one is typically the most neglected.
Increasing the social ties and relationships between individuals and teams create a sense of shared responsibility that is a powerful factor in creating a high-performing organisation.
From a tech perspective, this aspect is all about widespread adoption, creating online and offline community spaces that are carefully designed to facilitate deep community engagement.
Business value is a product of healthy
workplace dynamics
If you have healthy organisational dynamics that foster coordination, collaboration, and community, your people will deliver the necessary business value.
The technology they use to do it is secondary. They’ll find a way.
Many businesses tend to decide on a new digital workplace platform or technology and then try to figure out how to get their people to use it.
Instead, focus first on what your people need in order to coordinate, collaborate, and build community. Then figure out what technology you need to deliver that!
