With its promise of modernity, fluid collaboration and increased productivity, the digital workplace is seen as the grail of internal digital transformation for organizations. In any case, it’s the most visible element, because transformation issues are everywhere, as long as we’re willing to tackle structuring issues in terms of work processes and organization.
Having said that, and despite the hindsight we have on the subject, the causes of failure are numerous, and very rarely linked to technology.
When a digital workplace project fails, it’s usually due to strategic and organizational mistakes , or even political problems.
Here are the 10 best ways to fail with your Digital Workplace.
Neglecting the user experience
It may seem obvious, but a complicated digital workplace, with unintuitive interfaces and poorly integrated functionalities, is a guarantee of massive rejection.
And yet, as I’m wont to say, if e-commerce sites were designed like certain digital workplaces, merchants wouldn’t sell much.
So, of course, it’s a question of UI and UX, but not the only one.
One of the main problems, and not the easiest to solve, is that when we talk about user experience in a digital workplace, we think tool by tool, within each application brick, whereas what counts for the user is the experience within his workflow, which implies using several tools in a row or even at the same time(Employee experience is sick of the software industry).
Then there’s the complication of the digital workplace, due to design errors, but also to the complication of the business, which is reflected in the tools(A complicated IT experience. Irritant #7 of the Employee Experience)
And finally, when we talk about the digital workplace, we think first and foremost of white-collar workers, forgetting blue- or gray-collar workers, for whom the experience is somewhere between very poor and absent, since they often have no access to anything (Companies are not omnichannel at all! Irritant #10 of the employee experience and Digital Transformation : don’t forget blue collars).
Imposing tools without consultation
The most knowledgeable about user needs and the best experts in user experience are the users themselves.
There’s nothing like a top-down decision without listening to them or involving them to create resistance or even rejection. First of all, on principle, because users don’t like it, but also because we run the risk of making the wrong choices, whereas listening to them would have taught us things and perhaps even given us new ideas.
What’s more, in certain parts of the business there may be things that work and give complete satisfaction, without us even knowing it.
As with any transformation program , change management needs to start at the design stage (Change and transformation need a new approach).
Multiplying tools and creating redundancy
Over time, we tend to pile up tools for communication, project management, storage and so on, without any clear strategy. Perhaps we think that the more tools there are, the more likely it is that users will find what they’re looking for.
And then there’s shadow IT, which can be a good way of testing things out, seeing what works, what’s in demand and adopted, but should only be a provisional discovery phase.
The result? Time wasted hesitating between tools, finding the right one, coordinating between employees who need to collaborate at some point but don’t use the same tools for a given need.
The ideal situation is, of course, to start from scratch (A daring zero-based Digital Workplace) but, over time, you also need strong governance and a strategy of continuous improvement to avoid new tools being added here and there, sometimes under the radar. Once again, it’s not a problem for a BU to try out something new and still be satisfied with it, but in this case you need to decide quickly whether or not to generalize its use to everyone and, if so, which existing tools need to be removed and replaced.
The more coherent and rationalized the technological stack, with a minimum of redundancy and a maximum of interoperability, the better.
One last thing: don’t neglect the unified search engine , which is the “glue” of your digital workplace, provided it indexes everything, really everything (Sometimes you don’t have an intranet problem but a search problem). (You don’t have an intranet problem, you have a search problem!) It also allows for use-cases as advanced as they are unexpected (The implicit social network according to Sinequa).
Ignoring corporate culture
A digital workplace cannot succeed if it goes against the organization’s culture. This was the tragedy of many projects aimed at integrating so-called “2.0” collaborative tools in the 2010s, with the idea that the tool would be self-supporting, and that it would by itself give rise to collaborative uses and practices that we were unable to put in place.
The opposite is true. As we often say, “ulture eats strategy for breakfast”, and these tools clashed with that culture.
In a business with a strong hierarchical structure, promoting tools that encourage horizontal collaboration not only creates tensions, but also doesn’t work (We should not expect an application to work in environments for which its assumptions are not valid).
Neglecting training and support
I’m a great believer in the concept of affordance, and in an ideal world everyone would intuitively understand what a tool is for and how to use it.
For those for whom the term is new, in UX, affordance refers to the ability of an interface element to intuitively suggest its use thanks to its shape, position or appearance, thus facilitating user interaction.
Ever read an iPhone or Mac OS user guide? You get the idea.
But the reality principle quickly catches up with us, and adopting a digital workplace doesn’t happen by magic.
Launching a tool without sufficient training or support, without an ambassador or mentoring program (which has the advantage of being scalable and as close to the field as possible) is shooting yourself in the foot from the outset.
Underestimating security and compliance issues
Here, various issues intersect, ranging from strict compliance to a broader, more vague notion of trust, not to mention the risk of business or confidential data leakage.
This subject is all the more sensitive as users are now sensitive to the issue of personal data confidentiality in their private lives, and import this concern into the business, adding to the business’s historical paranoia about data leakage (not always unjustified).
So if users don’t know what you’re doing with their data , you’ve got a trust problem.
If they fear that their actions will be scrutinized (he quantified organization: Grail or Big Brother?), their e-mail inbox spied on, the contents of their hard disk scrutinized, or in any case if there is no clear information on the subject, you have a trust problem.
With the proliferation of collaborative and shared workspaces, a fortiori when they’re shared with customers, there should be no doubt or concern as to who has access to these spaces (and in some tools this is anything but obvious).
I won’t even mention the question of data hosting, which must be dealt with upstream.
If there is any doubt, or worse, if a data breach is confirmed, or if it transpires that the business is not complying with legislation, confidence in your digital workplace will be a distant memory.
Measuring success with the wrong indicators
Focusing solely on the number of users or frequency of use of tools is insufficient and even irrelevant.
Of course, knowing that people are connecting is the minimum, but the question is to know why and what outcomesthis produces.
I remember an intranet manager telling me that to increase the number of connections, his priority had been to include the vacation request tool and…the canteen menu on his homepage. Visits did indeed soar, but I doubt the ROI for the business was worth the effort.
So having connected users means that the heart of your digital workplace is beating. But there’s nothing to say it isn’t napping instead of walking.
It reminds me of the time when I used to see people crowing about the number of users on their business social networks, about the communities they’d created and how active they were, without being able to say what was coming out of it (Your indicators say that your online communities are very busy ? So what ? and Enterprise 2.0 and the measurement hypocrisy), which proves that even more than 10 years later, the issues remain the same).
Worse still, some indicators can be counterproductive , like what Microsoft wanted to put in place before, obviously, backtracking (How to motivate your employees to blow hot air instead of being productive (thank you Microsoft)
First of all, ask yourself what you really want from your digital workplace, and then you have three levels of indicators: those that prove that your digital workplace is alive (people go there), that it works (people do things there) and thatit’s productive (we know how to link what happens there to business outcomes).
In short, it has to be useful, usable and utilized, and the indicators have to prove it.
Not taking changing needs into account
Have you launched your digital workplace? Has it been easily adopted, is it popular, is it even a success?
Good, you can move on to something else.
In fact, absolutely not!
A digital workplace frozen in time quickly becomes obsolete, needs and technologies never stop evolving, and if you don’t keep up, users will end up bringing in their own solutions, and that’s the end of governance and risk management.
I remember a large business which, proud (and rightly so) of its digital workplace, virtually disbanded the team, contenting itself with minimal maintenance. After a few years, alternative solutions abounded in the company, with the agreement of the IT department, which had come to the bottom line that their digital workplace was too obsolete to evolve, and that in the short term, the best solution to meet users’ needs was to let each business unit do its own thing.
Ideal in terms of cost and governance.
Your digital workplace project must include a continuous improvement process, with regular reviews and a system for listening to users.
Lack of leadership and vision
Without a clear vision and strong support from top management, the digital workplace is reduced to a collection of tools with no coherence or objective.
This is especially true in large companies, where the subject can become almost political, even though we’re talking about a tool that should serve the business.
The communications department sees it as its main means of communicating, IT wants to get its hands on the project since we’re talking about technology, each business wants its needs and tools to be given priority, each country has its say, etc. And as management generally doesn’t care about the project itself, it’s all the same. And since management generally doesn’t care about the subject and doesn’t get involved, there’s no one to decide, and everyone indulges in endless steering committees where no one ever agrees.
In the business I mentioned , the “new digital workplace” project wore out 5 project managers, two of whom burned out, and they had to maintain an obsolete platform incapable of evolving for years.
Management has a duty to formulate a clear vision, force collaboration between stakeholders and arbitrate when necessary.
Failing to anticipate and integrate new uses
Work is changing, and by definition the digital workplace cannot ignore new ways of working.
Case in point? How many businesses found themselves during COVID with tools unsuited to remote work or asynchronous working? Either functionally or in terms of remote accessibility?
I also had the case of a business where the infrastructure hosting a key business tool was not dimensioned for so many remote connections at once (security issues, I believe). Users therefore had to organize time slots or take turns using it….2h per day each.
Very productive.
Here again, you need not only to be constantly evolving, but above all to anticipate, because it’s not when a need arises that you can change everything in 24 hours.
Bottom line
In the final analysis, a successful digital workplace is little more than a question of technology. It’s also about experience design, reflection on working methods and processes, change management to be integrated right from the design phase, and a bit of politics…
The specifications often give pride of place to technology, but the success factors are more often than not human.
Image: digital workplace from Rawpixel.com via Shutterstock.
