When your company implemented its most recent digital workplace platform, you reasonably expected more collaboration and productivity and, likely, some of those expectations have not been met. Perhaps job productivity isn’t increasing with great velocity, or effective communication across your global enterprise remains unaffected. 

Here are a few key focus areas to support better results for your global digital workplace initiatives: 

• Facilitation of connections, communication and collaboration
• Incentive programs for technology adoption
• Employee life cycle programs

1. Focus on the Potential to Facilitate Connections, Communication and Collaboration

It’s important to regularly communicate with team members the benefits using new DW platform technologies, which include:

• Connections: Providing the right technology allows employees to connect according to their needs — across time zones, multiple physical offices and with remote staff. 
• Communication: Communication technologies have proven impactful at facilitating improved sharing of information and with collecting feedback from team members. Miscommunication is lessened when using the right digital channels.
• Collaboration: Collaboration tools increase the company’s ability to solve problems more effectively and feed into data analysis systems that can make your team members’ jobs easier over time.

2. Consider Incentive Programs

 Incentive programs contribute to your organization’s goals, engaging with end users and rewarding them for utilizing new technologies. 

Programs range from internal evangelists who meet with small groups, to gamified email campaigns that guide end users to the software to complete tasks and become familiar with the system’s capabilities. (These campaigns progress to executing entire workflows.) Over time early adopters are identified and become part of the evangelist team to help accelerate further adoption of current and future technologies. 

3. Employee Life Cycle Programs—Onboarding

Implementing digital workplace platforms during onboarding is a crucial component to advancing platform utilization. Jayne Lerman leads  employee digital experience for worldwide payments and technology at Mastercard. As the key person responsible for adoption, Jayne applies a holistic mindset that covers the employee career—beginning with onboarding.

Jayne reminds others in this space that “expectations now are that the technology we use in our work lives needs to be just as good, if not better, and as easy to use as what we have at home.”

Using digital workplace platforms for onboarding prepares employees as potential evangelists for future initiatives.

Final Thoughts

What additional actions will help move digital workplace platform initiatives forward? According to a 2019 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report, it’s important to consider current and future outcomes that your organization needs to deliver and that will impact the employee experience.

For example, what workflows can be simplified? What tools would make certain jobs easier?

For leaders the best way to achieve a high pay-off is by joining your colleagues to share successes, challenges and lessons learned at Digital Workplace Experience, June 3-5, 2020 in Chicago.This conference presents unique opportunities for leaders to meet and learn from fellow executives about the latest and greatest digital workplace experience practices. Register now for this unique event.