Reimagining digital workplace experience to drive productivity
Employers have invested in more digital ways of working, but there’s little evidence these technology solutions are moving the needle on workforce productivity. By redesigning the virtual and hybrid workplace with humans at the center, organizations can improve the worker experience and deliver real business results.
The future of workforce experience starts now
In today’s world, digital tools are used to connect the complete workforce in a hyperconnected world where workers may affect market performance as much as customers do.
To go from looking digital to living digital, the workplace must be redesigned to operate in synchrony and connect all workers to those that they work with when, where, and how they need it—regardless of location, device, or time zone. Making the shift requires connecting worker experience to business outcomes. By putting workers at the center of design, it becomes possible to create a digital workplace that transforms how people collaborate, get work done, and ultimately do business.
Deloitte brings together strategists, experience and product designers to help our clients transform their workforce experiences.
Building and sustaining the tech workforce
In a growing digital world, the tech workforce is key to turning yesterday’s impossibilities into today’s accomplishments. However, the search to finding top tech talent is becoming a leading business challenge. Learn how leaders can build their technology talent strategies to enable digital transformation.
From looking digital to living digital
A robust digital workplace enables business outcomes and amplifies my workforce experience by augmenting my ability to do work, increasing my ability to collaborate across physical and digital places, providing insights and linkages to my organization’s mission, connecting me with the people I work with, supporting my growth and development, and enhancing my well-being and sense of belonging.
Business outcomes are measurable, quantifiable goals that the organization intends to achieve. They provide direction, help organizations prioritize initiatives, and clarify what success looks like. Everyone in the organization should know the business outcomes to aim for and their personal role in bringing those outcomes to fruition.
By focusing on outcomes, you can avoid reactively bolting technologies onto existing processes. Instead, you can focus on delivering intentional, meaningful, and measurable business results via seamless and integrated solutions.
A workforce experience reflects the sum of a human’s lived experiences at work and how the workforce feels about their organization. To deliver an effective digital workplace, organizations need to focus on the factors that drive a great workforce experience. They include:
- The work I do
- The people I work with
- The places I do work
- How work affects my life
- The company mission
- The sense of belonging I feel
- How I grow as a human
The result is a workplace that reflects the digital interactions in workers’ personal lives—on demand, social, and comprehensive—in their online work experience.
As an employee, you might say, “A seamless digital workplace provides integrated solutions for me, for my team, and for my job.” More specifically:
- Solutions for me enable personalized self-service so you can readily complete tasks for yourself, such as enroll in benefits or open an IT support ticket
- Solutions for my job let you quickly and securely access the digital tools you need to carry out your duties. Think access to an electronic health record system if you’re a clinician, or access to the customer relationship management system if you’re a sales representative
- Solutions for my team seamlessly connect you to your colleagues and organization. Examples include general business utility tools like video conferencing, project management, and collaboration
Technology capabilities are important to understand because they enable the solutions you provide for your digital workplace. Vendors tend to describe their capabilities differently, so here’s a common taxonomy to help sort them out.
- Seamless entry: Provide you with access to digital tools, whether onsite or remote
- Sprinting and sharing: Boost your productivity and innovation by giving you a rapid, seamless, and cohesive way to interact with others
- Sensing and sentiment: Apply business intelligence, automation, and data insights to help the organization be more responsive to your needs
- Service and support: Provide personalized guidance and attention, streamline worker experience, enable access to physical spaces, and empower well-being across the organization
- Specialty: Enable core business operations and industry specific jobs for a seamless and personalized experience
Laying out the vision
When it comes to digital workplace productivity, it’s one thing to understand the architectural elements. It’s another thing altogether to combine those elements into—something that is sound, durable, fit for purpose, and delightful to the user.
A robust digital workplace delivers on these criteria:
Start with the specific business outcomes you aim to achieve with the digital workplace.
The digital workplace maturity model
A maturity model is a way to measure progress of digital workplace improvement. It allows organizations to determine where they stand today and what changes they need to make to get to higher levels of performance.
The digital workplace maturity model has four levels of workforce experiences and technology capabilities:
Explore more
Gartner® does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner® research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner®’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner® disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
John Brownridge
