Editorial
Employees are drowning in an ever-rising tide of digital tools.
The increasing number of apps in the workplace — an average over 267 per organization — has created significant challenges, often outweighing the intended benefits. App overload leads to wasted time, mental fatigue and reduced productivity due to constant switching and fragmented data.
The growing “toggling tax” and operational complexity mean it's time organizations take action to streamline their digital environments through tool consolidation, systematic audits and better integration.
Borrowing From the Digital Employee Experience Book
Our digital headquarters matter more than ever. By taking a leaf (both metaphorical and literal) out of the digital employee experience book, we can make sure our whole digital workplace has a more coherent vision, shared by its various stakeholders. And from that vision, organizations can do what Lotus Cars’ founder Colin Chapman used to say: “Simplify, then add lightness.”
You start by first removing unnecessary applications, then optimizing the remaining tools for agility and speed. Organizations will help employees better find their way in the digital landscape by doing so. We’ll have to keep four separate, but related tenets in mind as we work through the challenge:
- The concept of siloed or vertical digital tools, which cause app bloat issues.
- The idea of a mixed or hybrid digital workplace, that clarifies the interconnections in our digital landscape.
- A horizontal digital platform that connects the various vertical tools in the digital workplace.
- And the notion of the digital workplace owners’ association taken from the DEX book I co-authored in 2021.
The Problem of App Silos
I've consulted on over 50 intranet, digital workplace and DEX (digital employee experience) for healthcare, education, government and non-profit organizations. Each and every project I’ve worked on has had the same problem with the avalanche of applications in their digital workplace.
I've come to call these many digital tools siloed, perpendicular or vertical platforms. They are characterized by their narrower, specific field of application: Think HR systems, ticketing applications, financial administration and internal social media platforms. The traditional intranet — by which I mean primarily a news and comms medium — is also essentially a vertical platform.
Supporting staff, such as HR, facilities and finance, are typically responsible for these vertical systems. But specialist departments handle their functional management, for example when it comes to patient/client files, student tracking systems or geographical information.
Most organizations have dozens, if not hundreds, of these vertical systems. One of my recent clients had 1,000 officially supported applications (not including any shadow IT like Trello, Slack, ChatGPT and so on).
This app tidal wave forces workers to app switch frequently, resulting in information siloes and duplicative work, and is one cause of the fatigue that is becoming so problematic for employees.
The complexity this app tidal wave creates stands in contrast to the relatively straightforward work they support:
- Healthcare: A nurse or home care worker who needs direct access to a patient file or to treatment protocols.
- Education: Teachers or tutors who can easily access student information on any device.
- Logistics: Warehouse managers who require a simple overview of order information and which items are where.
- Hospitality: Restaurant managers who want quick access to occupancy overview or overview of reservations.
- Manufacturing: Technicians who need work instructions for a certain type of installation or equipment.
3 Types of Digital Workplace
In 2016 I wrote (in Dutch) about three conceptual types of digital workplace.
1. The Landscape Digital Workplace Concept
The landscape concept is the most common form of digital workplace.
A landscape digital workplace is a mix of vertical applications and task-specific systems owned by functions such as HR of Finance. Its strength is its flexibility: each function can select the most effective tool for its own needs. It’s basically best of breed. Its challenge, however, is clarity: employees may not know where to go for certain information or tasks. This often leads them to bypass “official” tools and adopt shadow IT, further fragmenting the landscape.
To make this concept effective, organizations need to clearly define the role of each tool and consistently communicate to employees how and when to use them.
2. The Universal Digital Workplace Concept
On the opposite side of the spectrum is the universal digital workplace concept: a single, overarching digital platform where employees can read news, book leave, reserve meeting rooms, order work equipment, access customer information, manage calendars and projects, join video calls and more.
To some, this may be the digital workplace utopia, to others it may represent workplace hell. Whatever view you share, it doesn’t matter — because it doesn’t exist. If you could actually design and build the universal digital workplace, it’ll take years and years, and shedloads of money. And when it’s finished, it’ll immediately be outdated.
Building such a system requires thousands of use cases, lengthy development cycles and heavy management costs. Ultimately, a universal digital workplace will prove unworkable: too slow to deliver, too rigid to adapt and out of sync with how people actually do their jobs. No one digital platform can seamlessly bring together the full range of organizational needs, from HR transactions to financial processes to cross-team collaboration.
However, organizations and vendors appear to be working towards as much harmonization in their digital workplace as possible, to getas close to a universal solution as they can. In a sense, Microsoft 365 tries to be the universal office workers’ digital workplace solution.
The Bridge Between the Landscape and Universal Platforms
However, there is also a third option:
3. The Hybrid Digital Workplace Concept
The hybrid digital workplace strikes a balance between a perceived fragmented landscape and the practically impossible universal vision.
It combines the diversity and flexibility of the specialized application landscape with the structure and centralization of the essentials. Employees can either use their content and functions in a single interface, or find what they need to do their work from a single starting point.
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Its success hinges on a single application that bridges the multitude of vertical platforms to bring together many — although frequently not all — content and functions needed in the digital landscape. Some might call this an “intranet.”
An Owners’ Association for the Horizontal Digital Workplace
So, if we agree that our current app bloat is a plague and a horizontal solution contributes to the cure, one problem remains: the vertical platforms have a multitude of owners, but who owns the horizontal platform?
I don't think that a horizontal platform can have a single owner. This is where Tabhita Minten and my 2021 book comes in: “Digital Employee Experience: Put Employees First Towards a More Human Digital Workplace.”
In our book, Tabhita proposed cooperative ownership for the digital employee experience, but this applies to the digital workplace as well: combined ownership based on a shared interest and a joint responsibility. As we wrote:
The DEX Model brings together the four perspectives of the employee, organization, technology and physical environment. To be successful in this, we believe that the approach should be based on shared interests and joint responsibility. In addition, we distinguish at least six different stakeholders, who (must) have a seat at the DEX table in organizations.
- Tabhita Minten and Christiaan Lustig
Digital Employee Experience: Put Employees First Towards a More Human Digital Workplace
Those six stakeholders were:
- Human resources
- Communications
- Information technology
- Facilities management
- Primary process/business
- Management
But isn’t there a final boss in this owners’ association?
Is management the ‘Commander-in-Chief’ in this context? Yes ... But also no. If management is not necessarily in charge when it comes to digital employee experience, then who is? In our experience, HR, Communication, IT, Facility Management, business, and management have shared interests and a shared responsibility to support employees in such a way that they can serve their customers, students, patients, and guests more easily and faster.
For the ownership of an intranet or wider digital workplace, we often recommend an ‘Association of Owners.’ This is a good and very practical solution that in our opinion also translates very well into an association of owners for digital employee experience.
To prevent a tie in the votes in such an association, the association must choose someone who can make decisions if necessary. That could very well be (higher) management, but that is not necessarily required. The most important thing is that the stakeholders involved put the interests of the employee first and work together.
Simplify, Then Add Lightness
The digital workplace has become a maze of tools. Individually, each has value, but collectively they are overwhelming.
The universal all-in-one platform remains a distant (and impossible) dream, while the fragmented landscape leaves employees lost in silos. A hybrid model, where a horizontal platform provides clarity and connection across vertical systems, offers a more practical path forward.
But technology is only half the story. A sustainable digital employee experience depends on cooperative ownership — an “association of owners” — across HR, IT, Communications, Facilities, management and the business.
Only by working together around a coherent vision, and keeping employees’ needs at the center, can organizations move beyond app fatigue and create a workplace that is simpler, lighter and truly supportive of people doing their best work.
A digital workplace that helps:
- Nurses or home care workers can access colleagues' contact details and find their patient file and treatment protocols in a single horizontal platform, even though each task is serviced in separate, siloed tools.
- A teacher with a horizontal dashboard for grades, student records, and communications, as well as organization news, allowing them to focus on their teaching.
- Engineers can access work instructions, manuals, and spare part details in a horizontal (tablet or phone) app while on-site, and log the results from their in the same tool.
To create an employee-first digital workplace, do what Lotus’s Colin Chapman did: “simplify, then add lightness.”
Editor's Note: To read more about making sense of our complicated digital workplaces:
- Measure What Matters: The Fifth Principle of Digital Employee Experience — When cross-functional teams define what “good” looks like — from a systems perspective and the experience of employees — they’re more invested in achieving it.
- Don't Let Your Company's Digital Tools Sabotage the Employee Experience — It’s time for organizations to overhaul their approach to digital employee experience.
- Want to Design a Better Digital Workplace? Go to the Mall — What can digital workplace and employee experience designers learn from shopping malls? A surprising amount.
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