The Digital Employee Experience is essential to the success of your organisation. It indicates how satisfied employees are with the tools you offer them and the way people work with technology within the organisation. And satisfied employees are the foundation of an organisation. So how can you use the adaptive workspace to create a solid Digital Employee Experience?
Before we get into the ways you can optimise your workspace to improve the Digital Employee Experience, we first discuss the several ways in which using the adaptive workspace already takes your Digital Employee Experience to the next level.
Complexity in the IT systems causes frustration, unproductivity and heaps of lost time. No one wants to waste their time searching for the login credentials of yet another web application, or even the application itself, having to take a detour every time to open one specific application via Remote Desktop, or having to search through a pile of documents for the correct version. A scattered workspace takes up time, effort and unnecessary brainwork, which causes people to be able to focus on their primary tasks a lot less.
With Workspace 365, you unite everything you need to work in one workspace, where you can access everything with one click through Single Sign-On. From applications and information, to document management systems, news, intranet and more. It’s even possible to integrate legacy software, such as the Remote Desktop and file server, and offer it in a consistent manner.
This way, people have one central starting point of their day, from which they can access everything they need in the same, effortless way. This does not only save them time, but a lot of frustration as well.
Everything in one workspace is a lot. It’s too much. Not everyone in an organisation needs the same things, so it’s not smart to offer everyone a workspace with all the same applications and information. Therefore, the workspace can easily be customised to a specific group or individual, and the workspace automatically adapts to make working easier. Consequently, every individual only sees the application and information that are relevant to him or her.
The workspace adapts based on, among other things, someone’s role, location, device and browser. This enables you to for instance set up that remote applications are not available for someone who’s on his or her phone, or that when someone works in a browser in which a certain application is not available, the tile turns grey and they get a pop-up when that person tries to open the application. This way, it’s a lot more clear for people how they can and can’t work, and they don’t have to worry about applications that “don’t work for some reason”.
The fact that the workspace adapts automatically, makes it even easier to work from different devices. Besides, seen the fact that the workspace is located in the browser, it’s easily accessible from any device, whether it’s a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Thus, you can easily take your entire workspace with you, if needed.
This is not only helpful for mobile employees, such as ambulatory care workers or Sales employees. Also people who occasionally work from home, which happens more and more, teachers who constantly work in different spaces and grade papers from home, or people who simple need a little more flexibility, benefit.
When we’re talking about the Digital Employee Experience, the focus shouldn’t solely be on the ‘Digital’ part. In the end, the Employee Experience is what it’s all about. That’s why the Digital Employee Experience, contrary to what many people think, is not just the responsibility of the IT department. Communication and HR play a big part in this.
With the adaptive workspace, the IT department can involve Communication and HR with optimising the Digital Employee Experience and give them the right tools to do so. For instance, admins can make them Owners of specific app groups, or certain tools. Later on in this blog, we’ll get into some specific tools.
Naturally, every organisation wants their workspace to be safe. But on the other hand, no one wants to deal with complicated processes or burdensome safety procedures. With Workspace 365, admins can set up their security settings in such a way, that security becomes a natural process.
One of the factors that allows them to do so, is the earlier mentioned adaptability of the workspace; admins can for example make sure that sensitive information can’t be accessed from outside of the company network.
Also, there are several security measures you can take, such as setting op Multi-Factor Authentication with Azure. This adds an extra security step to the access to the entire workspace or specific applications, where someone has to verify their identity.
You can also ensure that people can email safely, due to our integration with SmartLockr, and you can add extra access management and Life Cycle Management with our HelloID integration.
By utilising the extra security options, you make sure that employees don’t have to think about security themselves anymore, but that this is done for them. This way, you can be sure that employees don’t (accidentally) make the wrong choices, get stressed out or lose too much time contemplating security implications.
So it’s clear that using and correctly setting up an adaptive workspace already get’s you far when it comes to a better Digital Employee Experience. But within this digital workspace, there are countless extra steps you can take to improve the Digital Employee Experience. We’ll go over a number of them.
Not every employee has the same digital dexterity. There will always be people who can use some extra support, whether it’s an employee during the adoption process, or a new employee who’s not familiar with the workspace yet. Even people who are already used to working with the workspace can use some (technical) support once in a while. You however don’t want people standing with their laptop at the IT Service Desk, every time they have a question or problem, or everyone sending their questions through email or chat; that’s simply cluttered and inefficient. Nevertheless, there are ways you can offer IT support through the workspace.
The How-to tile is especially convenient for people who are learning the basics of the workspace. In this tile, you find short how-to videos explaining how you can use specific aspects of the workspace. This tile works based on permissions, so that people can only see how-to videos of functionalities they can actually use.
With the How-to tile, people can independently learn about the use of the workspace and find information on their own when they need to.
People often spend an unnecessary amount of time on standard business processes, such as claims, time and mileage registrations, requesting work clothing and working with quotations. You can simplify these tasks (and more) with Micro Apps in Workspace 365. These are simple apps, focused on executing a specific task, which you can connect to for example documents and emails. This allows people to easily execute these tasks, without having to leave the workspace and without having to use large organisation applications with tons of redundant features. A great example of this, is the Vilans KICK Micro App.
You can also create your own Micro Apps with Microsoft Power Apps. With this, you develop your own specific applications to simplify your business processes. You can integrate them into your workspace with a few simple steps.
A way to simplify IT support on both ends, is by using a service management system. You can also integrate it into your workspace, so that people can always view their support tickets from their dashboard. At the moment, you can use both a TOPdesk live tile and a ConnectWise live tile.
For the situations that require a bit more urgent support, you can integrate a chat functionality in your adaptive workspace with HTML. This is especially useful for mobile employees who need remote support. Through the chat functionality, they can quickly request and receive support, so that they can continue working, wherever they are.
Usually, people are pretty willing to look for the answers to their questions themselves. But then it does have to be clear where they can find the answers. We often see that organisations do have manuals and protocols available, but these get lost in a complicated folder structure. This frequently results into the searching person losing a lot of time with the search, and eventually having to ask someone anyway. This is frustrating for the people wasting time searching and waiting for answers, and for the people who get asked these questions over and over again.
To make this information quickly and easily accessible, you can integrate folders with manuals and protocols in the Document live tile. This way, people have them quickly at hand and they can find what they’re looking for with the search functionality.
Setting up workspaces is a process in which much time and attention is spent to what employees need and to training and educating the employees. Which is good, of course, but what happens after this process?
The answer to this is that there is no ‘after this process’. The world is constantly changing, as are your employees. Your workspace should too. It is therefore important to keep asking your employees what they need, what their challenges are and what they could use extra support with. You could do this by surveying your employees once in a while, with the help of Microsoft Forms. You easily integrate it into the workspace. Consequently, you can keep improving and adjusting your workspace, based on your employees’ needs.
So the ultimate digital workspace is not just a matter of one set-up, and you’re done. It’s constantly maintaining and improving. Another way you can monitor this, is by integrating analytics. Again, with the use of HTML. This allows you to monitor the use of the workspace and to see how well the adoption of (parts of) the workspace is going, with facts and figures. Are people for example not using a certain part of the workspace a lot, but is it the aim that they do? Then maybe, people find that part difficult, and they could use some extra training. By keeping track of the analytics, you can spot challenges and opportunities for improvement, that otherwise may not have come to light.
A big part of the digital experience is about how people communicate and collaborate online with others. To enable people to collaborate and deliberate online more easily, you can integrate tools such as Microsoft Teams or Yammer.
Communication is also very important to HR and, naturally, the Communication department. For them, the Announcement centre and the Announcement live tile are very important tools. With these, messages can be posted in a tile on the dashboard, or more important announcements can be pushed to the employee in the form of a pop-up.
With these tools, employees effortlessly stay up-to-date on the latest company news and announcements. It is also a way to digitally connect people to the organisation and culture; to build your internal brand.
The Digital Employee Experience may focus on the digital part, but primarily is a component of the Employee Experience. It is a part of the way employees feel within your organisation, and for you a way to involve and motivate them and strengthen the company culture. It’s about more than just pushing tools and providing company information, but it’s the way you digitally create a community and motivate people.
The adaptive workspace provides you with a platform to do so. To integrate more than just work tools, and strengthen your organisation every day.