How to Drive Employee Productivity with a Digital Workplace

  In today’s fast-paced business world, numerous studies show a direct correlation between employee engagement and productivity. In essence, employees are more likely to excel when they feel committed and invested in their work. One of the best ways to foster this sense of engagement is by creating a dynamic and supportive workplace environment enter the digital workplace.

What Is a Digital Workplace?

A digital workplace can be defined in both, tangible and intangible terms.  

In intangible terms, it is essentially an acknowledgment by the organization that employees need not be in the same physical location as their colleagues in order to effectively carry out their responsibilities. This acknowledgment is borne of the notion that employees must be given every opportunity to succeed by catering to both, their personal and professional needs.  

In tangible terms, it is the creation of a virtual workplace whereby technology is used to accentuate and compliment employee processes and functions. Moreover, this repository of knowledge can be accessed by employees at any time and from any device. 

Using Office 365 To Build A Digital Workplace

In order to build an effective digital workplace, you must use Office 365.   

Office 365 is a Microsoft productivity suite which includes SharePoint, Exchange, Teams, Skype for Business, Planner, Yammer, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint among other solutions. Building modern sites ensures that the digital workplace is accessible on all mobile devices.  

How Does a Digital Workplace Help?

The creation of such a platform will help improve your employees’  productivity and engagement by meeting their personal and professional needs.   

• Increased flexibility fulfills your employees’ personal needs.  
• Collaboration and faster communication can help them realize their professional needs.  
• Increased efficiency leads to an increase in your organization’s productivity across all functions and at all levels.  

1. Increased Flexibility

Employees, today, are constantly on the move. They spend a great deal of time commuting to and from work. The time spent traveling is an untapped avenue that can be used to improve overall productivity.  

As it is a cloud-based software, Office 365 Modern Sites will permit your employees to access relevant information and tasks from any location and at any time.   

Office 365 uses state-of-the-art encryption that ensures the safety of all your proprietary information. As such, your workplace will remain secure, irrespective of the location it has been accessed from.  

Creating such a platform allows for flexible working hours and arrangements such as working from home, which in turn, improve employee engagement.   

An increase in the number of households wherein both parents work means that flexible working environments are increasingly valued. As such, creating a digital workplace  will help ensure greater productivity by making your organization a coveted place to work at for the brightest talent.  

2. Facilitating Collaboration

The use of tools such as SharePoint facilitates collaboration across departments and locations.  SharePoint enables your employees to quickly access the repository of organizational knowledge. This enables them to benefit from a virtual learning environment that improves their understanding of the topic.   

This improves productivity due to their improved expertise. Moreover, this improves engagement as they perceive that your organization is providing them with the tools and opportunities to attain professional growth.   

By quickly connecting with employees in other locations, your employees can leverage existing knowledge from one department to solve a problem in another. Your employees can quickly seek out expert knowledge within your organization.  

This saves time and improves technical expertise, which in turn, greatly improves productivity.  

Moreover, collaboration allows for crowd-sourcing across your organization. Employees at different locations and at different hierarchical levels can share their ideas. This improves  productivity  due to differing perspectives. Furthermore, the employee engagement also increases as they perceive that your organization values their opinion.

3. Faster Communication 

The use of Microsoft Teams allows employees to enter into group-chats wherein relevant information can be shared in real-time.   

Moreover, its features enable your employees to conduct online meetings through video conferences and share relevant information with employees everywhere.   

The use of Yammer allows employees across your organization to communicate with each other in real-time through instant messaging.  

Moreover, communication can be clearly planned to depend upon the goal. Employees working on a relevant project can communicate with each other instantly, irrespective of distance.

4. Increased Efficiency

The  digital workplace improves efficiency and  productivity through the use of technology to streamline activities. Important information and documents can be quickly and easily accessed.  

The use of Microsoft Planner will allow your employees to assign tasks, set due dates, and constantly monitor the progress. Moreover, meetings can be easily set by comparing daily schedules and reminders sent to the concerned parties. This improves the planning of your employees’ work day and their time-management skills, subsequently improving their productivity.   

A  digital workplace  is a repository of accepted practices, as well as organizational processes. This collection of data helps in informed decision making in the future. New employees can easily and quickly learn organizational processes by reducing time and effort expended. Moreover, it will enable your employees to create workflows for tasks, thus creating a template of repeatable actions.  

SharePoint allows users to arrange the page to display only relevant information. This will allow your employees to collect relevant information in one spot and add to, or subtract from it in real-time. This allows for a more focused approach, which in turn, improves productivity.  

5. Inclusiveness

The use of Microsoft Teams and its live broadcast feature ensures that all users, no matter the location, can share your organization’s goals and vision. As such, employees that work from home and employees that travel a lot have a means that allows them to remain connected with your organization at all times.   

This allows all of your employees to share in your organization’s culture, which in turn improves employee engagement.  

Conclusion

The key to succeeding as an organization is increased employee engagement, the driver of productivity. An Office 365 Modern Sites does so by fulfilling employees’ growing personal and professional needs.  

The concept of an Office 365 Modern Sites is necessarily fluid and depends upon the specific needs of an organization. As such, it will be most effective at improving employee engagement, and therefore productivity, when it is customized to suit the specific needs of that organization.  

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