The past decade has seen a significant shift in workplace setups and trends. With tech-savvy millennials joining the workplace and SaaS applications growing at a phenomenal rate, remote working has increased. With that, it has raised the need to adopt some essentials for digital workplaces.
The recent trends have not merely changed the face of workplaces, but they have also posed new and unique challenges that some organizations have trouble solving. A modern enterprise has distributed teams, rapidly evolving business structures, and complicated security issues.
Therefore, there’s a need for certain things in the workplace, without which any organization will have a hard time working smoothly.
With the workplaces transforming, people working in these settings need to know what should be a part of their organization.
Here are some essentials for digital workplaces that you cannot overlook if you want to meet a modern workforce’s expectations.
What Are The Essentials for digital workplaces?
Most organizations have been operational for a long time but somehow have been unable to keep up. As an enterprise, you need the following essentials for digital workplaces to reach the innovation curve’s plateau.
1. Document Management
As your organization grows, so does the volume of information passing through it every day. While some of this information is paramount and needs to be stored for the future, the rest is never needed again and should be discarded.
The data could be in any form – paper or digital. From spreadsheets and reports to forms and videos, you need to manage a lot of information. Every day, you’ll have an influx of data about operations, business, customers, employees, marketing, management, etc.
All of this data should be stored and kept in an accessible format.
A document management system organizes the data. In this way, you can retrieve the data whenever you need it or search it up using the platform’s quick search functionality.
Plus, employees can also collaborate with each other over these documents. For instance, if the marketing team needs to study last year’s strategy to devise one for the upcoming quarter, they can easily access the previous year’s information from the document management system.
The Ultimate Document Management Guide
2. Efficient Collaboration
A digital workplace is different from a physical one in the sense that you cannot simply walk over to your co-worker’s cubicle to get a set of documents or ask a question. Instead, you have to do all this online.
Therefore, your digital setup should allow communication and collaboration between employees.
Enterprise social networking helps organizations stay tight-knit even when working remotely. On the one hand, employees can share information and news with each other, staying engaged with their teams.
On the other, having a carefully designed digital workplace prevents distractions by only showing relevant notifications and posts rather than ringing the bells continuously.
Thus, it fosters a healthy communicative working culture where people can collaborate without boundaries.
3. Chatbots
Chatbots are one of the essentials for digital workplaces because they can be as advanced or as simple as you want them to be. They may merely give you algorithm-based responses or be based on intelligent AI algorithms for broader communication.
If you use chatbots internally in the organization, they can improve the employee experience. Instead of going to HR for everything, the employees will have the self-service capacity with the chatbots in place.
Plus, it also lessens the load on certain departments, such as IT, as the resources are accessible for the employees.
Furthermore, if you use chatbots for customer support, it can be of immense help. Research shows that chatbots reduce the cost of customer service by 30%. That’s a chunk of money that could go on something else.
While doing so, chatbots also improve customer experience as their response time is quicker.
Besides, when the chatbots are busy dealing with routine questions, the support technicians can deal with unique problems faced by the customers.
4. Cybersecurity
Working in a digital space means being vulnerable to cyber threats and hacking. That’s why there’s a huge concern around data breaches.
Fortunately, almost all cloud-based applications or solutions you get for business come with strong cybersecurity. In most cases, the security is even better than on-premise protection.
Breaches can be external and internal. To prevent internal breaches, you should create restrictions about data retention, editing, and sharing. For instance, you can create a policy around who can access sensitive information and how the data should be shared.
Among all other external attacks, email phishing impacts digital workplaces most often. You should educate your workforce about safe practices and cultivate a sense of responsibility in the whole organization.
5. Flexible Integrations
As a business, you will have different digital systems, such as Microsoft 365, CRM, CMS, DAM, etc.
You need to develop a structure in which all these systems can integrate easily to smoothen the workflow while preventing any significant challenges.
In a digital workplace, all your systems should be unified so that the employees can access them with ease. Additionally, it will allow you to centralize the technological architecture while letting you make decisions flexibly on an enterprise level.
6. Data Analytics
Data analytics are one of the essentials for digital workplaces because they give you an idea of how well everything is doing. From the Intranet and customer service to employee performance, analytics monitor and report the performance of everything going on in the workplace.
At an individual level, they can give you information about every employee’s expertise and engagement. After learning their skills and shortcomings, you can use the full potential of each employee while filling the skill gaps.
Nowadays, analytics are quite powerful and let you integrate data with different business processes.
Plus, they let you group data so that it is sorted for future use or migration to another tool or software.
Conclusion
While technology is an integral part of any digital workplace, it’s not the only aspect you need to work on. Besides tech, you must also ensure effortless integrations, employee communication, document storage, and operation alignment with business objectives.
Once you’ve got all the essentials for digital workplaces, you can fulfill your workplace’s vision and create a result-yielding digital culture.