What is Modern Hybrid Workplace Experience?

The rush of digital information coming at your employees is a wave they can ride…or one that sweeps them under. In a related technology space, an expanding range of digital screens available to your workforce stands to either command attention…or set eyeballs to glaze over. It’s more than simply which will you choose. It’s how you choose to have data and display work together, to create an exponentially more powerful, more personalized combination in the form of a digital workplace experience.

The Forward View

For all its power to communicate, the long-standing “broadcast” approach — a single message to multiple destinations and audiences — builds silos and promotes disconnects. There’s a lack of relevancy, a “what’s in it for me” that individuals have come to expect. It also falls short on the seamless experience that today’s digital natives have come to expect as consumers. The forward-thinking organization — from manufacturing to hotels, from universities to call centers — needs to be able to communicate to the workforce in a way that provides targeted experiences, services, apps and content on any device, anytime and anywhere.

The reasons for this are reflected in real business benefits. Share ideas, news and knowledge quicker. Cut down on meeting times. Establish communities of interest. Forge new relationships beyond the expected work groups. Offer a workplace experience platform to access key company applications. Identify and activate cross sell and up sell. Better productivity and creativity. More focus and efficiency.

A Grand Unification Theory

There’s a fair chance that you won’t have to build this workplace experience platform from the ground up. (There’s an even better chance that news is a relief!) Those current disparate systems — email, HR policies or resources on the company intranet, the sales enablement app a remote team needs to learn best practices — can be brought together through a single communications platform. This unifying engagement platform creates a layer that spans systems and screens to provide a seamless and robust digital workplace experience.

Think about every diverse thing your organization needs to communicate: emails, intranet policies, town halls, internal meetings. Now think how that can be streamlined and transformed with a single sign on to a workplace experience platform. This one central mechanism is where you can create, publish, and measure those communications. Each endpoint you designate has delivery and tracking capabilities, providing for specific targeting to the titles, personas, roles and geographies of your workforce. That platform can also provide employees a choice of channel and device: an additional level of personalization that is more critical as workers evolve beyond physical offices and demonstrate preferences for remote — even virtual — locations.

Finding Meaning in the Moments

Connect the dots from these examples to the potential “meaningful in the moment” opportunities in your own workplace:

• Field reps receive real time updates specific to their expertise, customer and geography.
• Employee training advances from “one size fits all” to become knowledge delivered as personalized, optimized online learning.
• A modern intranet displays refreshed content on a regular basis, answering pertinent questions, helping employees easily learn about benefits, and providing quick access to PTO balances and pay stubs.
• Call center signage, desktop and mobile can communicate call time imbalances, and provide customized call scripts to improve efficiency.

While these instances are one way, the organization that’s ready for it can also benefit from two-way communication. Giving employees a chance to comment and publish content from their screens is a way to both motivate and evaluate participation. Enabled, empowered employees often lead to greater results for their team. For two-way feedback, the best workplace experience platforms will have a moderation system built in to provide proper checks and balances.

Singular Workplace Solution, Many Opportunities

Your screens can now be active (and interactive) where work actually happens.  Coordinated, controlled content or data is delivered via mobile posts, Teams or Slack channels, wikis, portals and intranets, polling, and surveys — even tools such as Service Now and Salesforce — via laptop, desktop, smart phone, and digital signage. Even with more opportunities on the way, the right workplace experience platform manages the multiple end points and increases employee engagement and productivity.

Now you’re not herding data and chasing screens. Instead, one system provides a rules-based, customized digital experience that meets the unique needs of the workforce with comprehensive, company-wide targeted communication. Not to mention providing the combined analytics to gauge how it’s all performing, enabling you to further adjust and maximize performance from roles to teams to individuals.

The Question to Ask

At the end of the business day (and the start of the next), it’s a fact that every business outcome — productivity, efficiency, invention and growth — starts with your employees. With a human centric design, the separate screens across your organization become a means for delivering strategic, relevant data, content and apps to extremely targeted audiences — making for a happier, faster, smarter workforce. These are the kind of people that will ultimately offer your customers the best experience possible.

What if you could reach everybody, in the way that matters most to each? With a unifying workplace experience platform, there’s no longer any “what if” about it. The question instead is now one of choice.

“How will you define tomorrow’s workplace experience for your workforce?”