Editorial
Organizations who embrace some form of remote work for their employees are effectively hybrid. However, in hybrid organizations, internal comms, services and collaboration is too often focused on the physical headquarters and not the digital workplace. This is a mistake, as the digital workplace will allow organizations to better inform, support and engage with both their remote or office-bound employees.
It’s Not About the Physical vs. the Digital HQ
To my surprise, the battle between back-to-office mandates and remote work opportunities hasn't yet been won. A major international bank expects everyone to work in the office for five (!) days per week. And a previous remote work hero now requires employees to come to the office for at least two days.
Invariably, the argument goes that real collaboration and real connections can only happen in the office, and that people who hardly ever show up in the office, if at all, have much lower engagement with their employer’s goals.
The latter is a bit outside the scope of my expertise, but the (alleged) lower engagement of remote workers is not the problem. The real problem is employee engagement as a whole. This has been low for decades, both in the Americas (31%), in Asia (25%), in Africa (20%), and especially in Europe (13%).
In my view, there is no battle between the physical and digital headquarters. It's a matter of getting the right message across to employees, and supporting them in the right ways, through the right media and tools.
This requires, among other things, different forms of collaboration that we’ve been used to. A lot has already been said and written about these other forms of (digital) collaboration and which type of tools you can best choose. Sam Marshall did so in his article, Hubs, Hives and Hangouts: Adapting Your Digital Workplace. And I recently wrote about this in my post, How to Pick the Right Kind of Tool for Each Digital Conversation.
The Digital Workplace Has 3 Purposes
In light of these ongoing developments and the changes in how we work and collaborate since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I envision that organizations need to shift their attention to the digital headquarters.
The digital workplace has more than one purpose. It's not just a means of communication. It's not just a collaborative environment, either. And the neglected child of the digital workplace, service, isn’t its sole purpose either.
The digital workplace therefore has three purposes:
- Internal digital communication.
- Internal digital services.
- Internal digital collaboration.
I will explain what I mean by all three.
Internal Digital Communication
Internal digital communication is about sharing knowledge and making information available for colleagues. Think of news items, announcements, campaigns from corporate comms and so on.
We could roughly divide that into 2 streams:
- Need-to-know: the first category is important for your primary work process. If the shared living room of the nursing home where you work closes for a week due to a leak, you as a caregiver want to know.
- Nice-to-know: if the organization rolls out a campaign to recruit new colleagues, it is useful if you are aware of this, but it doesn't have to have a direct impact on your daily work.
I often also include information provisioning with comms: reference material or the “library” function internal platforms such as intranets often have. For example, these could include medical protocols (in healthcare), teaching materials (education), administrative documents (government) or reservations (hospitality).
Related Article: How Your Intranet Fits Into Your 2023 Workplace
Internal Digital Services
Digital services are about supporting employees’ daily work. Of course, that can also include(need-to-know) communication, but I mean something else, too. With this topic, the question is: how can a digital workplace support colleagues with their actual tasks?
I make a distinction between primary and secondary processes. When it comes to tasks and services related to primary processes, you can think of these examples (most of them come from actual research into employee wants and needs):
- In healthcare: access and edit a patient file.
- In education: reserve a study room for a group of students.
- In hospitality: report a malfunction in one of the accommodations.
- In manufacturing: ordering parts.
In addition to primary processes, there are also more pre-conditional, secondary processes that are only indirectly relevant to the work, but important for an employee nonetheless. Think of claiming expenses, viewing your PTO balance, requesting a company vehicle, but also practical matters such as being able to report broken lighting within facilities.
Internal Digital Collaboration
You've probably heard that there was a pandemic a few years ago. One of the consequences of this was that digital collaboration soon became interchangeable with video meetings. We noticed that it was very easy to schedule time with one or more colleagues.
The result was a proliferation of online meetings and almost continuous staring at a screen with five, ten, fifteen or even more colleagues. It's not Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangout — it’s the Muppet Show.
But there are so many more forms of digital collaboration. In his piece, Marshall mentions a few:
- The hive: a (larger) group that works on related tasks.
- The huddle: a (smaller) group that works intensively on one task.
- The hangout or the meeting place: a social area.
- The hermit: concentrated, individual work (deep work).
Before the pandemic, the hive — i.e. the open-plan office — was often the place where we did most of our work, and from that spot we could easily go to other rooms in the building where we would collaborate or meet one another, such as the huddle or the hangout.
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During the pandemic, the starting point for our work was mostly the hermit... and we found out that it wasn't so easy to move from that place to other forms of collaboration other than to jump on a Zoom call (which is a terrible idiom, by the way).
Related Article: Zoom Fatigue Continues, Three Years Later. How Some Businesses are Responding
The Digital Workplace Informs, Supports and Engages
When internal digital communication, service and collaboration overlap, you see keywords that will help you think about what the digital workplace can be to colleagues.
The digital workplace:
- Informs through communication and service: You reach employees through the combination of communication and service. On one hand, by bringing information to employees from the top down, and on the other hand, by making resources and tools available that are necessary for employees to carry out their tasks.
- Supports with service and collaboration: When catering to your employees, you see service coming back again. As an organization, you facilitate (or service) employees with tools, information and resources to perform their primary tasks, as well as secondary ones. Because online collaboration is part of most employees’ work, facilitating it well is also indirectly a form of service.
- Engages via collaboration and communication: With forms of collaboration such as working out loud (WOL), video meetings or collaborating in documents, you involve employees. In addition, communication/information provisioning is an important part of connecting with them too. Especially in combination with liking and commenting on messages on an intranet or enterprise social network (ESN).
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