As organizations around the world switch to digital work at a lightning pace, there has been a mushrooming of digital work tools and platforms that enable easier execution of work and offer flexibility to organizations to manage their remote and hybrid workforces. The advent of digital work has been so widespread that even organizations using legacy tools and systems are moving to digital workplace formats even for regular in-office work due to the ability to access work anywhere at any time and at any place and on any device. As is evident, this kind of flexibility offers organizations a vast maneuvering space when it comes to transacting and executing work far beyond the confines of walled office workspaces.
The future of work
As far as we can tell, digital workplaces are the future of work in more ways than one. They offer the ease of executing work online while offering a range of features, processes and workflows that ensure work keeps getting done at high levels of productivity. Digital work tools also offer ease-of-use to employees who then happily manage their work on a user-friendly platform with very little dependency on others to complete their tasks. The highly prevalent and fairly recent trend of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) at workplaces worldwide has resulted in many organizations moving their work to digital platforms to provide employees with the widest possible means of making work easier to accomplish.
What is a digital workplace?
A digital workplace is one in which traditional office processes and legacy work technologies are replaced with highly flexible and adaptable digital work tools that help employees transact work faster, more efficiently and flexibly. Digital workplaces often run on web-based tools that offer intuitive interfaces and processes that help employees complete their work tasks in as quick a way as possible with the least amount of effort required to move work between themselves. This results in higher productivity, saved time and shorter turn-around times. With a seismic shift in how the world works, more organizations are switching to digital workplaces around the world as we speak.
The importance of digital workplace services in business
Streamlining business operations
Business operations often involve a lot of complexity. With legacy systems and processes, operations can be a hurdle when teams are geographically distributed or have to work in some form of remote or hybrid capacities. In such cases, having digital workplace services augment physical business operations is an ideal method to ensure continuing productivity. It is easier to root out margins of error in business operations when all the records and data are transacted on a digital workplace that offers transparency and a streamlined process.
Improving productivity
The high point of digital workplace services in enhancing business operations is the productivity they ensure. While legacy systems account for human error by factoring them into business operations, the opacity they represent continues to be a problem for office based workplaces. Digital workplaces solve this problem by making the whole system transparent and offering need-based views into how work is getting done. Employees have access to all the information they need at the tips of their fingers and all of this is accessible from anywhere and at any time.
Effective collaboration
Collaboration has always been the foundation of any successful workplace. The better employees collaborate, the better an organization’s chances of achieving work success and high productivity levels. A digital workplace ensure not only that work gets done faster and more efficiently, it also ensures employees’ peace of mind and happiness with the amount of control and ease it offers in work transactions. Contextual collaboration is the key component that digital workplaces introduce and this has been proven time and again to help organization derive the maximum benefits out of their workforces.
Harnessing the power of social
Digital workplaces as a service contribute to employee well-being and happiness like never before. We have all understood the power of social interactions and conversations with social platforms. Digital workplace transformation services essentially turn your workplace into a well oiled and humming social network with employees being able to reach out to anyone in the organization at a moment’s notice for information or help they need to complete their tasks. In combination with an agile workplace culture, this feature is a force multiplier for an organization’s workflow because even in-office communication doesn’t allow for the reach and power of a global system like a digital workplace service.
Improving employee engagement
Employee engagement has always been the brightest side of digital cultures. If your employees aren’t connecting with or interacting optimally, work performance suffers. It is important in the digital age to keep employees happy. Happier employees translate to better work and better work cultures as is evident from a vast collection of studies on the topic. With extensive social channels, features like posts, comments and the ability to interact with other employees seamlessly regardless of geographical boundaries, a digital workplace service keeps work moving regardless of the uncertainties that surround workforces. It is far easier to keep employees motivated and happy to work when they are engaged socially and creatively with a platform that offers global reach.
Picking the right digital workplace for your organization
Digital workplaces are varied and there are no set rules for how they’re built. Many organizations are perfectly happy with more than one tool to build their digital workplaces, but for peak performance and productivity, it is important to pick a digital workplace service or a platform that offers all the tools, features and integrations you need within a single web-based platform. This way, you can cut down on subscription costs and gain better value from having all of your work on one platform. Kissflow Digital Workplace is an example of a digital workplace platform that has got it just right. With a vast array of features, apps, tools and analytics modules that talk to each other flawlessly, it is a great place to begin your journey to becoming a truly digital workplace.
