Intelligent Workplace: Key to Developing a Culture of Employee Engagement

In an evolving digital workforce environment, and with the rapid pace of innovation available to improve productivity, organizations recognize the need to promote new ways of working. The new workforce is joining organizations with the mindset of a digital consumer and employees want and need real-time access to data – and to each other, regardless of their location and time zone.

For those reasons, we see more companies embark on efforts to transform their internal communications and systems to be able to respond to their customers and market demands and better capture the collective knowledge and expertise of their employees. One of the major shifts in organizations’ digital workplace is moving toward an user-generated and data-driven content as a way to pull employees into corporate dialogs and provide personalized and relevant employee experience via company Intranet sites.

At the core of an intelligent Digital Workplace are four pillars: Collaboration, Communication, Knowledge Management, and Process Automation. Here are the key characteristics of a practical and intelligent Intranet and how it addresses those four pillars:

Better Collaboration and Consumer-like User Experience:

By being able to take a complex set of collaboration and communication capabilities, and deliver them in one easy-to-use and personalized user experience, employees are more willing and able to discuss and share ideas, and to collaborate. A delightful user experience that mimics state-of-the-art consumer apps, but with a corporate focus, requires minimal user training and generates high engagement.

“A modern and intelligent Intranet enables and encourages employees to create and share content and information, resulting in a true evergreen workplace with real content from real people.”

Connected to Other Business Systems and the World:

Being seamlessly connected to other company’s business systems and commonly used Cloud-based tools, the Intranet should be able to consolidate tasks and assignments in one centralized place for employees to act on. Having a modern and Intelligent Intranet solution will reduce or eliminate the need for employees to access multiple systems to collect information and complete their tasks. The best Intranets are the ones that easily enable business process automation and systems integration.

Support Data and Information Governance Best Practices:

Companies today face many challenges as they attempt to improve communication and collaboration, including complex and disparate systems that create information silos, multiple layers and degrees of governance and compliance requirements, and poor communication across these silos and layers.

Therefore, companies see the need to invest in modern technologies and processes to provide a robust data, document, and knowledge management platform. That means capturing expertise and the collective wisdom and experience of employees and helping them to surface and find the right content, at the right time, and in the right context using intelligent corporate Intranets and modern search capabilities. Also, rather than trying to control and police the content in a reactive manner, companies are shifting toward enabling and educating employees to be the agent/advocate of the company policies and data governance. That results in more employee engagement and a better-governed environment with less admin overhead costs.

“There are modern Intranet solutions that truly enable the proper creation, sharing and governance of content for organizations, however, the employee training and education of company’s governance policies is a vital factor in the success of those tools.“

Conclusion:

A robust and modern company Intranet enables people to connect with other people, whether individually or through communities, as well as connecting them with business-critical content, line of business systems, various productivity tools, and core business processes. A shift toward utilizing those modern Intranet solutions along with proper training and education of company content policies and information governance is the key to the successful implementation of the intelligent workplaces.

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About Optimum: Digital Workplace and Process Automation Consulting

Optimum helps clients implement and rollout Intelligent Digital Workplace solutions that provide a personal and relevant end-user experience to create and share content and to collaborate. Clients using our Digital Workplace consulting services benefit from our extensive industry and technology expertise to help them:

• Identify and define the information architecture, content strategy, and collaboration/communication needs of their digital workplace
• Design and implement Office 365-based Digital Workplace/Intranet solutions
• Integrate the Intranet with other company-wide line-of-business systems
• Gain real-time analytics and insights to govern, analyze, and drive efficiency of their process
• Develop robust and customized Governance Plans/Models for the Intranet

Contact us to learn more and see how we can help.