Love In The Workplace

When Robin Williams said "There are no rules. Just follow your heart" he was speaking about life but considering that we spend so much of our lives at work, employee engagement is becoming crucial to the digital workplace.

Digital transformation and cloud platforms have been driving a profound change in the way that our organisations work with customers for more than a decade, initially through email, ecommerce, and customer relationship management and more recently into a landscape where we’ve seemingly got an app for everything.

We’ve invested heavily in making our customers’ digital experiences seamless but in a modern cloud environment, the integration between customerfacing and internal systems and processes pushing to the cloud are all having a large impact on employees.

Platforms like Office 365 from Microsoft have brought integrated and mobile communication and collaboration tools that have opened up a whole new world of possibilities in terms of how, where and when employees interact with the projects, teams and systems.

Digital innovations have changed the role of employees and whilst much of the attention is often given to the potential negatives of automation and artificial intelligence, in the modern workplace employees are more empowered than ever before. In my role at Synergi, I help businesses to develop fast, lean and resilient integrated systems and recognise that the employee has effectively become an internal customer whose digital experience needs to be developed and honed with as much care as that for external customers.

We need to take into account fundamental factors such as security, privacy, accessibility and skill levels but we also need to make this a vibrant, dynamic, personalised and compelling experience to drive adoption and maintain the momentum of change. Digital transformation has to be lead from the executive level but it only takes hold and finds successful momentum when our employees are fully engaged.

Thinking of employees like customers helps to attract and retain top talent, you have a great head-start if you’re known for nurturing employee innovation, automating monotonous processes and using devices that support flexible and collaborative workspaces.

It’s no surprise therefore that the technologies evolving around Office 365 are focussed on helping organisations to build a digital workplace. Valo www.valointranet.com (Finnish for ‘Light’) is one of the leading examples and is all about employee experience, interaction and social engagement; it’s easy to deploy, beautiful to look at and it brings a warm, inviting and engaging front-door to what can otherwise be a complex and confusing digital landscape for many employees.

If you’re interested in seeing Valo in action then drop me a line, I’ll be hosting a digital workplace event on Friday 14th June when we’ll be explaining it all through, without the ‘geek speak’, over a warm coffee. It’s time to fall in love with your digital workplace.