Building a ‘business of tomorrow’ is the vision of any successful company. For several years, the topic of digital transformation has been gaining momentum as a key to achieving this vision: today, it’s considered a necessity to become a workplace of the future.
A Digital Workplace is a cloud-based platform, giving companies complete freedom to work virtually. A Digital Workplace, as the name suggests, is a consolidated platform of digital tools and applications, unique to an organization. Pooling these resources into a secure online interface includes benefits such as increased collaboration, productivity, and automation, along with enhanced user data visibility for decision making.
Companies use 16 SaaS apps on average today, up 33% from last year. (Source: State of the SaaS-Powered Workplace, 2017)
Sound good? It has its challenges too. Whether it’s to promote collaboration, share digital tools, optimize company performance or improve productivity, companies have countless reasons to make the move to a Digital Workplace. But how do you ensure successful implementation?
Lemon Learning explains how to successfully set up your Digital Workplace in 5 steps: inventory, change management, implementation of digital tools, employee training, and digital adoption measurement.
Step 1: make a roadmap
Questions, questions, and more questions: the first step towards a successful implementation is taking stock of the situation. This involves brainstorming everything from needs and challenges to solutions – to anticipate your implementation journey and any roadblocks you may encounter on the way.
- Why do you want to implement a Digital Workplace?
- What primary need will the Digital Workplace address?
- How many employees are involved?
- What is the biggest challenge facing this project?
- How many tools will your Digital Workplace include?
- What makes your Digital Workplace sustainable?
A key element of the Digital Workplace is collaboration. Use it to help define and answer your list of questions.
Digital Workplace: placing users at the heart of their digital tools
While you plan for a successful setup of your Digital Workplace, remember: a software solution should always meet the needs of its users. For your employees, change management will play a significant role in their adoption of a digital workspace. It’s essential to place your users’ needs at the heart of their digital tools to reduce change aversion.
Collaborate as a team
To set up a Digital Workplace, dedicate a specialized team to the project. Put together two to three complementary profiles to lead the project from A to Z (drawing up specifications, supporting the change or deployment) and spearhead collaboration with the various players involved.
Collaborate with management
Need help bringing all your employees on board the Digital Workplace? Then garner the support and commitment of your management, communicating with them at every stage of the project.
Collaborate with end-users
Your end-users are the key to digital tool adoption. To reduce possible resistance to the project, involve end-users from the very beginning to create a Digital Workplace that responds to user issues.
Step 2: set up your Digital Workplace
Once your roadmap is complete, proceed to set up your Digital Workplace, step-by-step.
- Choose your Digital Workplace: whether it’s a solution on the market or developed in-house, it’s important to choose a Digital Workplace that allows you to respond to the issues and inefficiencies identified in your roadmap. This way, your users can understand the value of a Digital Workplace, ask questions and become more perceptive to adoption.
- Configure your digital tools: in this step, you adjust the parameters of the various digital tools so that they meet the objectives set during your roadmap.
- Test your digital tools: this step allows you to make all the necessary adjustments to optimize your digital work environment before deployment.
- Deploy your Digital Workplace: your space is ready to be deployed! Depending on the scale of your deployment, consider the benefits of doing it in segments.
Digital Workplace: opt for embedded application support
24/7 embedded application support? With Lemon Learning, it’s possible and affordable! Directly integrated with your tools, our digital adoption solution allows you to provide real-time support to your Digital Workplace users. No need to spend hours responding to internal tickets: your support requests and costs are reduced, and each team can devote their time to important tasks.
Step 3: support the transition to a Digital Workplace
A tidal wave. That’s what implementing a Digital Workplace can mean for employees faced with digital transformation leaving many feeling lost. So how can you avoid it?
The implementation of a Digital Workplace goes hand in hand with change management and the need to instill a company-wide digital culture. The best way to support this change is consistent and transparent communication.
Your employees are facing the unknown, so they need visibility on what happens in the aftermath of change. In other words, they need you to make sense of the Digital Workplace by communicating its value, project progress, and what they stand to gain from moving to this new digital work environment.
Digital Workplace: establishing a digital culture
Setting up a Digital Workplace is just the beginning of your digital transformation. With countless technological innovations taking place including AI, big data, and cybersecurity, business practices along with the employment landscape, will continue to evolve. But what does this have to do with the Digital Workplace?
Today, no company can afford to neglect digital culture: it’s an essential step to promoting the concept of digital transformation and the digital tools that accompany it.
Step 4: train employees in applications
Did you say digital training? Absolutely. But what role does training take in the implementation of a Digital Workplace?
If you want to promote your Digital Workplace, it’s essential to train your employees inside it. Implementing a company-wide Digital Workplace comes at an expense, and an even bigger one if users fail to adopt it. Adoption failure, or adoption and subsequent churn, will have a direct impact on productivity, employee engagement, and company competitiveness. But how do you prepare employees prior to joining a Digital Workplace?
Digital Workplace: train your employees from their digital tools
Who said digital training has to be stressful? Thanks to the Lemon Learning solutions, you can deploy scalable training while meeting the challenges of training 2.0.
- Accessibility: Having the right content, accessible in the right place, at the right time is every user’s dream. With Lemon Learning, your employees can learn directly from their digital tools thanks to embedded interactive guides, accessible in real-time. The result? Increased user autonomy, thanks to practice incremental learning.
- Personalization: Can I combine large-scale deployment and personalization? It’s possible with Lemon Learning. In a few clicks, you can customize online training modules according to different criteria including role, department, or the language of your users.
- Updating: training content is great, adjustable training content is even better. With Lemon Learning, you can update your training with ease to make sure your users never miss new features, updates, or alerts.
Step 5: measure the adoption of digital tools
The final step in the implementation of your Digital Workplace is measuring ROI! Guide yourself with project objectives. Find out if your implementation is delivering on its promises with key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, if your objectives are to foster collaboration, strengthen employee engagement, and increase the use of digital tools, measure the rate of interaction on the forums, the rate of employee engagement on the tools, or the number of active users within them.
But be careful not to limit your ROI evaluation to numbers and quantifiable data. Decision-making data should also include qualitative surveys and human responses to truly optimize your Digital Workplace.
Digital Workplace: leverage your data
With Learning Analytics, you can access data collected in your tools, and leverage it to optimize training. The statistics feature gives you access to training module consultation rates as well as formats most appreciated by your users. The result? A sustainable Digital Workplace you can optimize, based on the needs of your employees.
Transitioning to a Digital Workplace is a transformation project impacting all stakeholders and departments of your organization. Use your managers to drive its value and reduce inevitable change aversion and remember: user needs lie at the heart of digital transformation.
Take a peek at our customer success stories. Or get in touch for more advice on ways to manage your company’s digital transformation!
