Digital Workplace Strategy & Design E-Book

Oscar Berg

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Why do most digital work environments slow employees down? Many organizations have lost control of the digital workplace to uncoordinated organic growth. If you're looking for tools to get back in the driver's seat and maximize value creation, then Digital Workplace Strategy & Design is just what the doctor ordered. With its ready-to-use templates and real-world examples, you will be primed to master the digital workplace and unlock the enormous potential of a holistic, iterative, and user-centered approach based on design thinking. The time and money your organization will save and the hassle your employees will be spared are just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine how much value your employees will create when they are empowered to work smarter together. Your step-by-step guide to - Identifying key problems and digital opportunities. - Adopting a new and smarter approach to the digital workplace. - Maximizing value creation with the help of service orientation. - Crafting a powerful digital workplace strategy rooted in hands-on experience and proven methodology. - Learning how to design winning digital services with actionable tools. What sets this book apart What distinguishes this book from others on digitalization, digital transformation, and the digital workplace is how extensively it is used in practice. This is because authors Oscar Berg and Henrik Gustafsson draw from a wealth of hands-on experience and apply these same steps in multinational companies from a variety of industries. Join the community Grab this book today and join a growing community of digital workplace and digitalization changemakers.

Leseprobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

DRIVERS & CHALLENGES

1.1 INTRODUCTION

1.2 WORK ENVIRONMENT PROBLEMS

1.3 THE USER EXPERIENCE DEBT

1.4 THE CAUSES OF THE PROBLEMS

1.5 THE CHANGE THAT IS NEEDED

1.6 SUMMARY

ADOPTING A NEW APPROACH

2.1 INTRODUCTION

2.2 THE PROCESS IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS

2.3 A NEW APPROACH IS REQUIRED

2.4 AN EXAMPLE FOR INSPIRATION

2.5 SIX GUIDING PRINCIPLES

2.6 SUMMARY

SHIFTING FOCUS TO VALUE CREATION

3.1 INTRODUCTION

3.2 SERVICIFICATION – A STRONG TREND

3.3 GETTING THE BASICS RIGHT

3.4 DESIGNING A SEAMLESS WORKPLACE

3.5 SERVICE ORIENTATION

3.6 AN EXAMPLE OF SERVICE ORIENTATION

3.7 PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

3.8 SUMMARY

DEVELOPING A STRATEGY

4.1 INTRODUCTION

4.2 THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE CANVAS

4.3 STEP 1 – START-UP

4.4 STEP 2 – CURRENT STATE

4.5 STEP 3 – FUTURE STATE

4.6 STEP 4 – ROADMAP

4.7 STEP 5 – COMPLETION

4.8 SUMMARY

FROM STRATEGY TO DESIGN

5.1 INTRODUCTION

5.2 PLANNING SERVICE DEVELOPMENT

5.3 SERVICE DESIGN

5.4 MEASURING PROGRESS

5.5 PUTTING DESIGN AT THE CORE

5.6 SUMMARY

EPILOGUE

REFERENCES

INDEX

Oscar Berg (co-author) is a consultant, blogger, speaker and writer based in Lund, Sweden. He is an internationally recognized export on collaboration and the future of work. Oscar writes and speaks about subjects such as digital transformation, collaboration, the digital workplace and the future of work. Website: oscarberg.net

Henrik Gustafsson (co-author) is a consultant, speaker and writer based in Stockholm, Sweden. He speaks and writes about subjects such as digitalization, employee experience, productivity, collaboration and the digital workplace. He also provides coaching in health, energy, and personal development. Website: movingmind.se/henrikgustafsson/

PREFACE

“Processes—the engines of flux—are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way. This methodical process of constant change and improvement was a million times better than inventing any particular product, because the process generated a million new products over the centuries since we invented it. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.”

The quotation above is from The Inevitable,1 a book by Kevin Kelly, who achieved fame as the founder and former executive editor of Wired magazine. In our view, it does a good job of summarizing what we need to focus on for successful digitalization and digital transformation of an organization. In addition to a clear purpose and vision, digitalization needs a process that spans the entire organization throughout its life, both creating change and changing when required.

Digitalization also requires a new approach in comparison to how most organizations have previously viewed the use of information technology. With digitalization, new digital technology is harnessed to enable and support new needs and behaviors. These needs and behaviors are in turn impacted and shaped by the digital technology we use. Technological progress and changes in our behavior are inseparable, like two sides of the same coin.

THE BLIND SPOT OF DIGITALIZATION

Technological progress is accelerating, and we will see a constant emergence of new digital opportunities and needs that organizations either play a part in creating or must adapt to. In other words, they need to be more innovative and agile.

These demands ultimately trickle down to the employees as individuals and as groups, and they are often caught in between rising demands and a digital work environment that slows them down rather than empowering them. This is because the growth of the digital workplace was almost entirely organic without any holistic view or coordination, making it complex, fragmented, and difficult to use. The question of how this environment should be designed to suit the employees and the work they need to do has not been asked often enough.

In our view, the digital work environment and the employee experience are the blind spots of the ongoing digitalization process.

Digital ways of working that allow unlimited digital communication and collaboration are an absolute must for successful digitalization and the required transformation of an organization and its business. Despite this, we still invest far too little in the digitalization of the employees’ ways of working and the development of the digital work environment, at least relative to what is invested in digitalizing the customer experience. And the focus that is dedicated to customers and improving their experience is almost nonexistent for employees.

Customer experience (CX) is often defined as the customer’s perception of a brand or organization resulting from all interactions during their relationship. Likewise, the same principle can be applied to employees’ perception of the organization they work for – employee experience (EX). This is based on all interactions between the employee and the organization during their employment relationship.

Organizations across all industries must provide the best possible employee experience to remain competitive. Succeeding in this will help them attract and retain talent, enhance employee engagement and productivity, and contribute to a better customer experience. The importance of the user experience in maximizing the value of using digital services is akin to the key role of the employee experience for the value created by employees individually and collectively. This necessitates working smarter together to maximize value creation in line with the organization’s purpose.

Similar to the different aspects of employee experience presented by Jacob Morgan in his book The Experience Advantage,2 we see the employee experience as comprising three parts: the organizational culture, the digital work environment, and the physical work environment (see illustration above). The employee experience is the sum of all these parts, and each must interact seamlessly and leverage each other to enable and empower employees to work smarter together. The continuing digitalization of our society and of our professional and personal lives steadily increases the importance of the digital work environment and its resulting impact on the entire employee experience. Our digital interactions shape our culture – the ideas and social behaviors we have in common. More specifically, we have a need to digitally interact with each other from anywhere, and this dictates what we require from our physical work environments and how we interact with them.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book presents an approach for holistically designing a digital work environment that considers both the culture and the physical work environment. Use the overview of the book’s structure below to quickly find the knowledge you need when you need it.

Chapter one introduces you to how digitalization is changing the business environment, why it is important to support creative knowledge work and develop digital ways of working, and what type of problems many employees encounter in their digital work environment.

Chapter two defines the digital workplace and describes what approach organizations need to both address problems in their employees’ digital work environment and take advantage of new digital opportunities.

Chapter three explains servicification and service-dominant logic as applied to the development of the digital workplace, defines key concepts, and illustrates service orientation.

Chapter four describes how to quickly outline a vision and roadmap for the digital workplace and align them with the organization’s strategies by using an iterative and inclusive strategy process, which also enables new digital opportunities to be identified and utilized.

Chapter five sets the stage for how to go from digital workplace strategy to the design of digital services. It explains how to plan service development and how to design the right services in the right way using the principles and tools of service design.

We conclude with a short epilogue where we share some personal reflections and a few tips on how we can help you on your continuing journey.

In the back, you will find a list of references and an index with key terms to help you navigate the book.

When we began writing this book, our goal was to share a pragmatic value-centric and user-centric process for digitalization that is characterized by a holistic view, which we saw was clearly missing in the development of digital work environments. This is why we chose to fill this gap with the approach, processes, and methodology born out of our years as consultants, which we actively continue to develop and refine.

We hope that this book will help you and your organization create a digital workplace and an employee experience that truly empowers people.

Henrik Gustafsson and Oscar Berg

1 Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Penguin Book, 2017).

2 Jacob Morgan, The Employee Experience Advantage - How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces They Want, the Tools They Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate (Wiley, 2017).

CHAPTER 1

DRIVERS & CHALLENGES

1.1 INTRODUCTION

The rapid digitalization of our society is fundamentally changing the playing field for how companies and organizations create value for their customers. With the internet and social media, the power wielded by companies to influence which products and services become successful is shifting to consumers. At the same time, the increasing use of digital services in our personal lives causes us to develop new behaviors and expectations, and companies are struggling to keep up.

The gap that emerges between our increasing expectations and the inability of companies to meet them is ripe for new challengers. Those who see and are able to seize the opportunities of new behaviors, new technology, and new ways of creating value can quickly knock the wind out of previously successful companies by utilizing new innovations and business models. These new challengers can come from unexpected places, and neither they nor consumers care about old industry dividing lines anymore.

As a result, it is now nearly impossible for a company to make long-term plans for its business in any great detail. Instead, it must be change-ready and able to quickly adjust its offering and customer touchpoints. It must also identify in what direction the market, customer behavior, and technology are heading and adapt to new conditions rapidly. This requires that organizations be responsive, collaborative, creative, and agile – but many have failed to make these a priority.

1.1.1 DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Most organizations need to make a fundamental change – digital transformation. However, rather than investing in digital technology and purchasing new systems, this entails thinking digitally from the ground up and placing both customers and employees and their experience at the heart of everything the organization does.

Digital transformation means looking for and utilizing the possibilities unlocked by digital technologies to create the most value and the best experience possible for customers, employees, and other stakeholders involved in the business.

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.3

– Andy Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel

Creating a positive customer experience has become an increasingly important competitive factor. The entire organization must engage its customers and make the customer touchpoints with the organization and its products and services as smooth as possible. It also needs to continuously improve the customer experience. This requires collecting data and feedback from customers about their experience and using this to achieve new insight into how the organization’s value proposition to its customers and the customer experience can be improved overall. These are then used to make the changes needed to improve the value proposition and customer experience. This ongoing process is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The continuous loop for customer and employee experience development.

Accomplishing this quickly and effectively requires the organization’s employees to excel at collaborating throughout the organization, from customer service to product development and then back to sales and marketing. It is simply not enough for the customer experience to be digital – the employee experience is equally important.

Working and collaborating digitally is the only way to achieve the agility, reach, flexibility, and collective capability required. Just as steam was crucial to powering the Industrial Revolution, the internet and digital technology are also crucial to organizations that want to be successful going forward. Therefore, digital technology must be at the heart of everything they do.

1.1.2 THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK

The content and nature of human work is in the process of dramatic change as a result of rapid technological progress. A shift from manual work to knowledge work has been underway since the start of industrialization, and machines have increasingly taken over more of the manual work. Today, many employees work on planning, organizing, managing, and improving the business instead. On the basis of the data available, along with their own knowledge and that of others, they create information that is then communicated to and used by others. This is what knowledge workers do.

When management guru Peter F. Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker”, he was referring to people whose main asset is their knowledge. It’s their job to think, and among their ranks are lawyers, programmers, engineers, architects, and researchers. Today, new types of careers keep cropping up that exclusively or largely engage in knowledge work in the form of complex communications, analytical reasoning, and creative thinking.

The automation of routine knowledge work is another change that appears highly likely to have major consequences for the future. Computers and software are now taking over increasingly more routine knowledge work just as routine manual work has largely been replaced by machines and robots. The diagram in Figure 2 illustrates this change by showing the shift from routine to non-routine work in the US economy from the mid-1970s.

Figure 2. The polarization from routine work to non-routine work.4

The increasing rate of digitalization based on the internet as a platform and the emergence of new technologies like virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence accelerate this trend. We are already seeing “robot journalists” report sports scores for the Associated Press,5 and in the US, “robot lawyers” currently offer legal assistance faster and cheaper than human lawyers can.

However, one category of human work that is gaining both in scope and significance is creative and collaborative knowledge work. This category is shown in the upper-right quadrant of Figure 3. This work demands typical human qualities and capabilities such as empathy, creativity, improvisation, and collaboration, and we must all develop these to stay relevant on the labor market.

Figure 3. The future of work is creative knowledge work and creative manual work.

1.1.3 ENGAGEMENT FUELS PRODUCTIVITY

Most large organizations today have structured and optimized their business to mass produce products and services in a relatively stable and predictable world. They chased higher returns on their owners’ investments, mainly by increasing cost efficiency and creating economies of scale, but this was often at the expense of the people who worked there. Human qualities such as the ability to scrutinize and take initiative were viewed as merely getting in the way of production at the time.

In a sense, the crowning accomplishment of the Hierarchy and its management processes is the enterprise on autopilot, everyone ideally situated as a cog whirring on a steady, unthinking and predictable machine.

– John Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School

Now these organizations suddenly find themselves completely dependent on access to creative knowledge workers – those who scrutinize prior assumptions and solutions – in their search for new ways to create value for customers. The knowledge workers often encounter an organization with assumptions about its business that do not apply to creative knowledge work. Another issue is that these organizations do not understand what motivates employees to do their best or what modern leadership entails.

Therefore, the companies and organizations of today and tomorrow must get better at recruiting, developing, and retaining knowledge workers with the right attitudes, qualities, and skills. The employees must be given the right conditions and support to do their best and feel engaged in their work. Studies in recent decades have shown a clear link between a high level of employee engagement and organizational success.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.6

– Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple

Paradoxically, other studies show a trend where employees are becoming increasingly less engaged, and this applies to large organizations in particular. Aside from costing them heavily in lost production, this is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with how they operate (Figure 4).

Figure 4. The degree of engagement affects productivity and innovativeness.

There are naturally many reasons for this, but essentially it involves the ability, or perhaps the inability, of the organization to transition from routine work to creative knowledge work. A key part of this transition is to design the digital workplace to support creative and collaborative knowledge work and boost its employees’ engagement in the business.

1.1.4 WE WORK THE SAME AS IN 1995

For collaborative work, the time is long gone when it was possible to gather everyone in the same room. Today, we need to be able to work when and where it needs to be done, and the same goes for collaboration. Here’s where digital tools and ways of working come into play.

Figure 5. Support for creative and collaborative knowledge work is often lacking.

Most organizations have implemented IT systems that support repeatable business processes such as purchasing, manufacturing, sales, and distribution. In addition, they often have tools for management, communication, and collaboration within small groups such as project teams. However, there is a gap in terms of tools that support creative and collaborative knowledge work, as illustrated in Figure 5.

If an organization has social collaboration tools, they tend to become isolated islands not integrated with the other parts of the digital work environment. Its social collaboration tools also fail to replace well-established ways of working based on email, meetings, and phone calls, even in cases where they are significantly better-suited for these tasks. As a result, the cognitive load on employees increases rather than decreases. Thus, when new tools are introduced to support new ways of working, it’s important to remove the old ones.

In some sense, many organizations work the same way as they did in 1995. They still use the tools and ways of working that began to emerge at that time. Not much has happened since then apart from that these ways and tools spread from just a few employees to all the employees (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. The dominant modes of communication and collaboration.

However, reality was completely different in 1995 when compared with today. This makes these ways of working hopelessly outdated and inefficient.

1.2 WORK ENVIRONMENT PROBLEMS

Figure 7. Authentic voices about their digital work environment.

Although the systems and tools put in place for the employees were intended to make them more efficient and productive, many feel frustrated and that their hands are tied by the very systems and tools meant to help them. This causes enormous stress, and in some cases, even results in illness and sick leave. And “office work” isn’t the only type of work where the digital work environment causes frustration, stress, and sick leave. It can be even worse for those who work “on the floor”.

Inevitably, our work environments are becoming increasingly digital. Digitalization affects everyone everywhere, regardless of whether you are a system developer, payroll administrator, line manager, nurse, teacher, service technician, or sales clerk, and you will increasingly use digital devices and tools in your day-to-day work. Your ways of working will be digitized, and you will embrace this to create more value for the customers or citizens you serve.

The digitalization of our ways of working and our work environments is designed to make us more productive and innovative, thus raising the quality of what we do. The paradox is that the digital work environment is often not inviting, not engaging, and does not raise capacity in the manner required to support this.

We are forced to struggle with an increasingly large number of complex systems that are difficult to use, and we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information via email and other information channels. At the same time, our work is becoming more unpredictable, demanding, complex, and subject to change than ever before, yet we are expected to be creative, collaborative, and flexible.

And there’s no way to “digitally detox” by briefly disconnecting and relaxing at work either – it’s quite the opposite. Work is inevitably becoming increasingly digitalized, and we cannot do our jobs if we are not constantly connected, logged in, and glued to our computers or tablets. Shutting down an entire digital work environment or even individual systems obviously cannot be done in practice – the business would come to a standstill. Instead, something needs to be done to improve the situation. Otherwise, there is a risk it will grow worse as the implementation of IT systems continues along the same old track. We need to identify the most common problems and understand their causes before we can act.

Our experience tells us that most problems that crop up can be grouped into several general categories, which are illustrated in Figure 8 and described in the following section.

Figure 8. General categories for digital work environment problems.

1.2.1 COMPLEXITY

Just a few decades ago, employees generally had relatively few systems and tools. However, increasingly more processes and tasks have been digitalized over time. Thus, the number of systems and tools employees are expected to use and are required to keep up with has also increased. Their implementation has rarely been coordinated, and they have not been uniformly designed, which further increases the complexity of the digital work environment.

This struggle is validated by a report from the Swedish Work Environment Authority,7 which reviewed international research on digital work environments. The report concludes that some occupational groups use as many as 20–30 systems and that, despite this, new IT systems are regularly implemented without first establishing their needs. Jonas Söderström cites as an example that the Karolinska Institute University Library in Stockholm, Sweden, has 117 systems for only 110 employees.8 Another study found the following as a result of the implementation of new IT solutions without a focus on how this affects individual employees:

“The effective usage rates of enterprise software are down compared to two years ago, with users experiencing productivity losses of around 17%. It’s like giving everyone Friday off.”9

1.2.2 INFLEXIBILITY

The digital work environment of many organizations was originally created to support traditional desk work. At the time, it involved digitizing analog information and data. Typewriters were replaced with computers and printers, and internal mail was replaced with email. Work was performed in front of a screen at a desk in an office.

Now the situation is totally different. As knowledge workers, employees need to be able to work from various locations when and where the work needs to be done. People in almost all careers need to be able to use digital technology to perform their work. Many will never sit at a desk in an office because they perform their work elsewhere. On a factory floor. In a store. In a classroom. Or next to a patient in a treatment room. This development poses completely new requirements in terms of flexibility and access to relevant digital services. Unfortunately, the digital work environment does not always meet these requirements, and the problem is not just technology. In many organizations, people are stuck in old structures, approaches, ways of working, and behaviors that are difficult to break out of.

1.2.3 FRAGMENTATION

The increase in specialization in both the private and public sectors has significantly boosted the positive productivity trend we have seen over the years. But specialization also has a downside. Many of the IT systems introduced were designed to support specific specialist domains such as HR, finance, and product development. As a result, they perpetuated the organizational silos created by the increase in specialization and made collaboration more difficult across, within, and between organizations.

1.2.4 REDUNDANCY

Large organizations often carry a long legacy of poorly coordinated and integrated IT systems. In many cases, they have the same type of functionality, which makes it difficult to know what should be done and where – and they are paying for the same functionality many times over. For instance, multiple systems include document management and collaboration functionalities. They may also include the management of basic information about employees and customers. As a result, the information is often spread out across multiple systems and the same information is recreated over and over again.

In addition, most of the content is unstructured content, such as documents and websites, which is difficult to process in an effective and controlled manner. This often involves large batches of text contained in documents spread out across local hard drives or file servers, in email systems, on websites, or the intranet. For instance, the moment a document is sent by email, it spreads like a virus and creates even more unnecessary redundancy, which is costly to manage and impairs findability.

1.2.5 INCONSISTENCY

Furthermore, the user experience between different systems is often inconsistent. This applies to not only the systems’ appearance but also their functionality. For instance, there may be one way to perform a task in one system and a completely different way to perform a similar task in another system. It is then up to the users to learn the differences and remember them each time they use each system. This increases the cognitive load on the employee, resulting in stress and mistakes.

1.2.6 POOR USABILITY

Until the mid-2000s, IT development was driven entirely by companies and organizations. New IT solutions and computers were introduced in the workplace first. Systems were purchased to support various administrative functions, automate processes, and enhance the governance and monitoring of the business with the aim to increase quality and efficiency. If there were any usability requirements, they were low on the list of priorities. Suppliers did not make usability a particularly high priority in the design of their IT systems either. As a result, many organizations are now stuck with old IT systems with major usability deficiencies. And although suppliers have gotten better at usability in recent years, they still have a long way to go to catch up with the tools and services designed for consumers. The latter – services designed for consumers – is what sets the employees’ level of expectation in terms of usability.

1.3 THE USER EXPERIENCE DEBT

Imagine you have a big family and a large supply of tableware, but the dishwasher is broken, so you decide not to wash the dishes after each meal. From breakfast through to dinner, you accumulate an increasingly larger pile of dishes until your tableware runs out. Now when you go to the kitchen, you are met with an overwhelming pile of dirty dishes. The mere thought of dealing with it stresses you out, so you decide to go and lay down. But when you wake up and go to the kitchen the next morning for your morning coffee, you realize you have no choice but to roll up your sleeves and do the dishes. Of course, when you are done, the cycle starts all over again.