The centrepiece of your platform for Virtual Team collaboration and the Future of Work is a ‘Digital Workplace‘.
Workplaces provide virtual environments for teams to meet, collaborate and action projects, achieved through web communities, video meetings and integrated workflow applications.
In simple terms this means what is traditionally known as an Intranet, a private, internal web site dedicated to your company, that with today’s technologies can be enhanced in various powerful ways.
For example they are also called ‘Social Intranets’, as they utilize social networking features, like Linkedin, so that employees can create member profiles and share updates to exchange knowledge and find one another.
Dion Hinchcliffe, a renowned digital transformation guru, believes they are critical to enabling successful virtual working building the modern digital workplace:
“The place where employees carry out their work online, often referred to as digital workspaces, represent an evolution that’s gone from simple company portals—which provide access to productivity tools, human resources, financial information—to a central hub for the essential aspects of employee engagement.
Digital workspaces enable people to connect with the colleagues, content and business applications they need in order to get their jobs done.”
Culture and Employee Experience: Best Practices for Building a High Performance Organization
A Digital Workspace provides a ‘virtual HQ’, an online forum for employees to meet no matter where they are physically located, which in an era of remote working highlights the central value of using this technology.
Featured Partner: Luma Apps
LumApps is an employee intranet solution designed to connect your employees and empower them to achieve more, transforming the way your company communicates, collaborates, and accesses information, with integrations for Microsoft 365.
The headline challenge for virtual teams is maintaining employee morale, as working remotely can easily lead to isolation and a sense of disconnectedness. Working together physically in the office brings many benefits, most notably this sense of social inclusion, and the knowledge sharing and collaboration that arises naturally from ‘water cooler networking’.
In this era of remote, virtual working this is a critically important dimension for organizations to address, as employees can often experience a sense of isolation and from this mental health issues.
Therefore one of the primary objectives of a Digital Workspace solution is the use of technology in innovative ways to address these challenges and replicate the social knowledge interactions.
Understanding and addressing this challenge is central to achieving a High Performance Organization (HPO), which is characterized by its ability to consistently outperform its competitors through a combination of effective leadership, engaged employees, and a culture of continuous improvement:
- Develop a High Performance Culture: Cultivate a culture that values performance, collaboration, and innovation.
- Invest in Employee Development: Provide training and development opportunities to enhance skills and capabilities.
- Set Clear Goals and Expectations: Communicate clear goals and expectations to align efforts towards achieving organizational objectives.
- Encourage Open Communication: Foster an environment where feedback is encouraged and communication channels are open.
- Reward and Recognize Performance: Recognize and reward employees for their contributions to motivate high performance.
Microsoft Viva
Importantly Digital Workspace applications specifically provide functionality for monitoring and boosting employee morale. In this video Microsoft describes three apps for building team culture in Microsoft Teams, to achieve these objectives.
For an enterprise-wide approach Microsoft offers Viva, a suite of tools that can be integrated into your digital workplace to enhance the employee experience.
In this talk Tameka McNair, a Microsoft HR leader leading the application of Viva to listen, learn, and drive iterative improvement in the employee experience, shares their own experiences of how Microsoft has shaped culture and systems using data-driven insights.
Gain invaluable perspective from “Customer Zero” and take away learnings and best practices that can help shape your HR strategy and employee experience.
