How to implement a digital workplace

Find out everything you need to know about digital workplaces.

Focus on user experience to improve adoption and productivity 

Employees often react poorly to having change forced upon them, especially when it leaves them feeling out of the loop or working with unfamiliar systems that change their daily workflows. To ensure the success of your digital workplace, it is key to include your teams throughout the planning, preparation, implementation, and feedback stages. This will help improve adoption rates and drive productivity once the new system is live.

Identify and involve key influencers

It isn’t always possible to include everyone in wide-spread organizational change, in fact, it can make the process of implementing your digital workplace slow and inefficient. Instead, only include department managers and key influencers within your organization who can be involved from the very start.

These influencers should come from a broad range of roles, departments, and seniority. Remember, it’s important to put the tools in the hands of those who will be using them on a daily basis.

Preparing your employees through internal process training

From an early stage, you should be using these members of your team to explore the workplace, learn how it works, and understand the potential it holds. Ultimately, by opening access to the tools and training from the start, you will empower your teams to adopt the platform and make it their own.

The biggest mistake we see when organizations try to roll out wholesale digital change is that they keep their teams in the dark until launch day. This means systems are often untested or haven’t been properly aligned with internal workflows. This usually results in employees and whole teams continuing to use legacy systems and processes and slows the adoption of your new digital workplace.

Getting your systems ready for the implementation

Unily’s digital workplace integrates with a wide range of systems and platforms from internal communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to CRMs including HubSpot and Salesforce. These tools are often essential to your employees’ workflows and woven into their daily processes. It’s important to ensure that your digital workplace enhances these tools and enables your employees to continue using them within a new ecosystem.

In fact, by integrating each of these key tools with your digital workplace, your organization can improve the flow of data between departments and systems. For example, by improving the flow of data between your sales and customer services teams, you are also improving your customers’ experiences. Digital workplaces break down the silos between teams and unite departments working remotely or from different offices.

Preparing your data and databases

Digital workplaces are built around centralized knowledge bases and the flow of data across your organization. During the planning stage of your implementation, it is key to audit existing databases and ensure that these can be united under one platform.

It’s a great opportunity to ensure that any internal documentation around internal process is updated and organized, including future processes relating to your digital workplace. 

It is also key to set up privacy and security rules around these knowledge bases, ensuring that employees can’t access sensitive documents and information that they shouldn’t have access to. That being said, C-Level only documents should still live within these hubs of knowledge, encouraging adoption from the top down.

Audit and prepare your existing tools 

As well as data, you will need to audit and review existing systems: are they still needed, can they integrate with the wider organization? Whilst it is true you don’t want to isolate your employees by removing tools and systems that form integral parts of their workflows, you also don’t want to hold on to legacy systems that are either no longer useful or no longer used by your teams. These could relate to internal communications, collaboration, and productivity and may have already been replaced or made redundant by the adoption of new cloud-based tools in the past. 

Eliminating these will help make your digital workplace implementation simpler and more approachable for your employees. By having a centralized place where they can find access to apps that they recognize and know how to use, they will be more likely to incorporate the new system into their daily routines and processes.

Remember, a digital workplace is about making your employees’ lives easier. The goal is to remove barriers to productivity and empower them to work smarter.

Making sure your digital workplace is functioning as expected

Once launch day arrives, you can’t rest on your laurels. It’s time to start measuring adoption, monitoring performance, and gathering feedback from across your organization. You need to look for points of friction for your various teams and ensure that employee experience hasn’t suffered at the expense of digital transformation. Again, it’s key to gather feedback from all levels of the organization, not just managers. Look for common trends within the feedback so that your team can implement updates, changes, and fixes quickly and with minimal disruption to the wider organization.

Discover more about digital workplaces or contact Unily for a demo of what adopting one could do for your organization.