While Digital Workplace platforms and Digital Transformation were already priorities for many CIOs and CEOs, the recent pandemic has highlighted the fundamental necessity of secure digital solutions for document sharing and collaboration.
The term ‘Digital Workplace’ was first coined by Paul Millar, CEO of Digital Workplace Group (DWG) in 2009, describing a Digital Workplace as “the collection of all of the digital tools provided by an organisation to allow its employees to do their jobs.”
9 Pillars of Digital Workplace Success – Free Report
More than half of respondents say their investments in the digital workplace have improved business agility (57%), business continuity (56%), and collaboration (52%), and more than two-fifths (44%) say they have increased productivity.
Recreating Work as a Blend of Virtual and Physical Experiences Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, May 2020
How is the Digital Workplace changing?
More than a decade after this first definition, this description must be amended to include the cultural and social aspects of a digital workplace, connecting people and providing a platform for
communication and engagement. It is likely that Paul Millar did not anticipate persistent chat or digital assistants, or the challenges around multiple communication channels and context switching.
For this reason Step Two’s definition is useful as it incorporates the need for platform cohesiveness: “The Digital Workplace consists of an holistic set of tools, platforms and environments for work, delivered in a coherent, usable and productive way.”
We believe the intranet is an integral part of the Digital Workplace platform, providing a space to
- Help people access fragmented systems and apps in a coherent way
- Surface essential links and resources
- Connect people for work and fun
- Present communications that are relevant and targeted
- Provide a platform for interactive learning and onboarding
So while the term “Digital Workplace” might incorporate the corporate intranet as well as the payroll system, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce and a project management app, the intranet should provide a way to access all of these additional services quickly and easily.
Why is a Digital Workplace Important?
The Digital Workplace platform is more necessary than ever to provide a cohesive, personalised portal to the organisation, a lens through which the many tools, links, documents and conversations of an organisation can be presented for productivity, connection and engagement.
“you can’t buy a digital workplace, it is a concept not a product”
Clearbox Report 2020
Driving Microsoft 365 Adoption
- Beautiful, intuitive interface
- Multi-dimensional navigation
- Surface content easily
- Personalisation for ownership
- Targeting for engagement
- Gateway for app integration
- Analysis and insights drive usage
Culture and Engagement
- Powerful branding and design options
- Integrated social experience
- Recognise and celebrate success
- Rich employee contact centre
- Unify departments, locations and time zones
- Support consistent onboarding
Communications
- Single source of truth
- Targeted and relevant
- Visually exciting
- Fast and easy to publish and distribute
- Two way communication
Productivity
- Document management and effective search
- Policies, procedures and templates
- Integrated M365
- Process automation & self service
- Virtual assistant
- Robust personalisation
”Employee turnover is often driven by a lack of connection to the company and a belief in the value of the company’s purpose: all addressed by effective employee communication”
CMSWire
Remote work and the Digital Workplace
Recent lockdowns merely accelerated an existing trend towards a more flexible approach to remote work. Surveys have repeatedly indicated a strong preference from employees to retain some days at home now that their ability to maintain productivity has been demonstrated.
The Digital Workplace fulfills several essential functions to support remote work:
- A “single source of truth” for communications
- The ability to highlight important or urgent messages
- Spaces for document sharing, co-authoring and collaboration such as Microsoft Teams
- Automation of processes with forms and workflows
- Training videos and acknowledgements ie “I confirm I have reviewed this information”
- Social connection making people feel less isolated and providing a way to meet new colleagues
- Project & task management, helping managers oversee productivity and output
Why a SharePoint Digital Workplace?
Digital workplace surveys and global intranet awards consistently show that SharePoint is the platform of choice for the world’s leading organisations. Why? It’s flexible and scalable, suitable for organisations from 100 to 5,000 people. SharePoint Modern lets you create, approve and publish beautiful, responsive pages quickly, incorporating images, maps, videos and forms.
Being part of the Microsoft 365 suite means you are probably already paying for SharePoint and benefiting from the mighty development and security investments of Microsoft. It also means that SharePoint is deeply integrated with M365 services like Yammer, Power BI, Planner and everyone’s favourite productivity tool, Microsoft Teams. (If you’d like to learn more about SharePoint vs Teams and how they work together, check out our Webinar on Demand).
SharePoint is a robust, flexible, future-proof foundation for your Digital Workplace and that’s why we used it to build our Digital Workplace, Injio.
Injio Digital Workplace
Injio is a Digital Workplace based on SharePoint that can be delivered in weeks. Injio integrates a range of systems and capabilities to deliver a central hub for users to:
- Locate information and resources such as policies, training videos, wikis and templates
- Quickly see updates from favourite apps like Outlook, Teams and Planner
- Connect with colleagues for work and fun
- Complete administrative tasks efficiently
- Stay across the latest news and industry developments
- View real time data like sales, stock prices or incident stats
Injio is built on SharePoint Modern, delivering elegant design, intuitive UX, faster performance and mobile responsiveness. Still on Classic? No problem, we can do that too.
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