The Invisible Components of Digital Workplace Success
“It’s not about the technology” is such a common PowerPoint slide at the conferences I attend on digital workplaces and digital transformation, that you’d wonder why it needs repeating. Surely we all know this. And yet it gets duly re-Tweeted like a lost wisdom of the ancients.
It is a classic example of the knowing-doing gap. Pfeffer and Sutton observed that people and businesses often know the right thing to do, but still end up doing something else. We all know we would have happier, healthier lives if we exercised more, ate extra vegetables, and never shared documents as email attachments, but we continue to do so. The barriers are often a combination of habits, costs, fear and lack of understanding about how to change.
When it comes to digital workplace initiatives slipping back into a technology focus, I suspect it is because the technology is tangible, familiar and feels like an easier change than addressing the fundamentals. In turn, it means that budgets tend to get swallowed up by licensing and IT implementation costs, leaving little for the ‘soft’ elements. And yet when you talk to leaders who have successfully implemented digital workplace initiatives, they all point to the non-technology elements as the critical success factors.
So in this post I want to look not at the technology dimension, but at the people and process side, particularly from a ‘business as usual’ rather than project perspective. It is these hidden enablers that can be the make-or-break between success in one digital workplace and failure in a seemingly identical implementation elsewhere.
The Invisible Components of a Digital Workplace
Over many years I’ve been developing and refining a framework described in detail as 10 elements of a digital workplace .
In summary, there are five ‘capabilities’ that have a technology underpinning: communication; collaboration; finding and sharing; business applications; and agile working.
Then there are five management activities needed to operate those capabilities well: Strategic planning; governance and operational management; proactive support for adoption; high quality user experience; and robust, secure and flexible technology.
Although these 10 elements have served well, I’ve come to realize there are additional aspects that act as glue to bring the whole thing together. Like the perfect sauce that combines a dish of individual ingredients into something remarkable. These ‘hidden’ enablers are:
- Sponsorship
- Ongoing resources
- Digital literacy
- Service design
- Measurement
You can see them illustrated in the figure below.
The key elements of a digital workplace (green segments) are pulled together by less visible enablers (shown in yellow).
1. Sponsorship
When clients first engage my company (ClearBox Consulting, thank you for asking) to help them with digital workplace strategy, I tend to ask “Why now? What’s driving you to tackle this?” Often the answer isn’t some change in business need, but the arrival of a new leader who has a vision for how things can be better.
It doesn’t especially matter which department or function they are from, because there’s never a single area of an organization that can unilaterally drive digital workplace success.
What matters is their emotional input: a good sponsor has to understand the vision ahead of everyone else because it isn’t practical to show the benefits to everyone up-front. They have to champion it so that it gets attention as a project and they have to stand firm when there are obstacles or nervousness. This is one of the reasons why an ROI-based business case is never enough: it might win funding but it doesn’t secure the resilience to see it through.
2. Ongoing Resources
How many intranets, collaboration platforms and knowledge management systems have been launched with a fanfare that also heralded Day 1 of their decay because the project team packed their bags and left nobody behind to run the show? Launching an intranet is like launching a magazine, not a book. Every day, you need new content, every month you need to be asking where to improve it and what needs to adapt. All of this requires continuous management and evolution of the intranet.
Learning Opportunities
Most other elements of a digital workplace are the same. For example, as Martin White and I have often observed, even when people sound like they are complaining about a search tool, what they are often complaining about is a failure to effectively create, maintain and tag content.
[See also: Diagnosing Enterprise Search Failures]
3. Digital Literacy
Gianni Giacomelli recently made a persuasive case for the monetary impact of reskilling. He argued that part of the return on investment resulting from training staff is it “improves the odds of digital transformation success.” The cost of not doing this is often deeply hidden in the day-to-day friction of failed collaboration. Many calls to return to the office post-pandemic are based not on a sound analysis of what can and cannot be done virtually, but on a reaction to poorly-supported people struggling to use virtual tools in the right way and reverting to what they’ve always done.
I recently spoke to someone supporting the board of a small charity. It’s functioning would be so much simpler if that board used the Microsoft Teams environment they had set up, but two board members point-blank refused, legitimizing other staff members to do the same. The charity wasted resources daily because people could not access reliable information. It was also exposed to data protection risks because sensitive information could not be controlled. I’m sure this story plays out in every organization that refuses to tackle digital literacy head-on.
Related Article: Will Chat Replace Email?
4. Service Design
In this context, consider digital workplace service design to be a mindset for ongoing improvements. In part it means thinking about the needs and irritations for a segment of employees and improving that experience end-to-end. For example, if a request form requires three physical signatures, you might introduce digital signing, but you could also consider if the process really only needs one signature, or automate the workflow to collect multiple signatures.
The other aspect to service design is to think about iterative improvement. It is too hard to analyze and plan all the ways in which a digital workplace might be used up-front. Instead you need to put the basic tools in place, and then devote resources to progressively applying those tools to solving things that really affect your business performance or employee experiences. Pick a problem, improve it in a sprint, then iterate or move on.
5. Measurement
Too often in our digital workplaces, we measure what the tools want to tell us rather than purposefully setting out to get answers to the questions that matter.
The final hidden component in any successful digital workplace is creating actionable feedback loops. Often this won’t be a number from a single source, but a blending of quantitative and qualitative insights. For example, if we want to improve the resolution of customer complaints, we might track the time it takes to close a ticket, but we should also monitor customer ratings and comments on their experience. Even better, we might start to measure upstream activities that will help future performance, such as how many help desk staff have taken relevant eLearning modules or how well our knowledge base of solutions is growing.
As you can see, none of these are about the technology. They are, however, about recognizing that there are multiple soft factors to success. It can be hard to make changes when the funding isn’t there (that knowing-doing gap), but it is possible before you start on a project to say “what outcomes do we want?” and then “what ongoing budget will we need to sustain those outcomes?”
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About the Author
Sam Marshall is the owner of ClearBox Consulting and has specialized in intranets and the digital workplace for over 20 years, providing consultancy to companies such as AstraZeneca, Diageo, Sony, GSK and Unilever.
He is the executive author of ClearBox’s leading reports on intranets and employee engagement platforms.
Connect with Sam Marshall:
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