The Digital Workplace Reimagined
A historic shift in the future of work
When COVID-19 became a crisis in early 2020, work for the entire workforce changed. For knowledge workers, offices shuttered, and they headed for home. Nurses, retail employees, factory workers, and beyond experienced overnight changes to their work routines. Historically, a dramatic productivity slowdown would have occurred; however, this was different. Organizations shifted their operations. In many cases the result was virtual-first operations, and day-to-day business carried on.
This accelerated the use of digital solutions. As an example, although virtual conferencing wasn’t uncommon pre-COVID-19, many companies had to upgrade their infrastructure to enable offsite usage. Healthcare providers expanded their telemedicine capabilities. Grocery stores boosted their investments in online ordering.
Since then, many have hailed the digital workplace as a solution to everything from business continuity to workforce engagement and retention. Some organizations are betting big on the future of virtual work and new ways work working. Others have accepted that some mix of in-person and remote work is likely here for the long haul resulting in the need to consider changes to the physical and digital workplace, invest in new skills, and establish new working norms. And for the non-office worker, organizations are investing in solutions that simplify work through digital enablement and automation (e.g., factory workers side-by-side with highly sophisticated automation, retail workers with handheld devices that enable everything from product information to customer support). Whether in-person or remote, workers in all types of work benefit from seamless digital workplace solutions to enable the future of work.
That’s fine with workers. For many, flexible work-from-anywhere policies have even become table stakes for accepting or staying in a job. A recent Morning Consult poll for Bloomberg revealed that 39% of U.S. adults would consider leaving their jobs if remote work were no longer an option, a share that rises to 49% among millennial and Gen Z employees.1 What about asking workers to give up some compensation in exchange for location flexibility? Think again: In another survey, 83% of employees say they would quit if their employers paid less for remote work than for onsite work.2 And for greater bottom-line results, organizations need to think about humans and technology working together across all types of work.
Hidden costs in fragmentation
The implication is that for a sizeable swath of the knowledge workforce, their digital experience is their workforce experience. Further, in today’s world digital tools are used to connect the complete workforce. But in a hyperconnected world where workers may affect market performance as much as customers do, many organizations have not yet addressed how their workforce can carry out their work optimally – and how that affects their outlook – in the digital environment provided for them. The numbers tell the tale:
- Most workers toggle between apps 10 times an hour, costing organizations 32 days per worker, per year of workplace productivity3
- Employees spend 25% of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs4
- Knowledge workers spend 40% of their time on work about work. That's 800 hours times 1.25 billion knowledge workers, equaling a trillion hours per year5
That seems counterintuitive given all the applications, communication channels, and collaboration tools that have sprung up to support more digital ways of working. Today, most employers have any number of digital solutions operating across the organization. But many of these solutions have duplicative features, and the ecosystem is becoming harder for workers to navigate. More concerning, there’s little evidence these solutions are moving the needle on workforce productivity. Instead, workers may confront an incoherent workforce experience, often echoed by a disconnect in priorities.
Reimagining the digital workplace
It turns out that there’s more to the digital workplace than simply providing workers with online access to office applications. Although most organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work – no small accomplishment under the adverse circumstances they were dealing with – for many this was a surface-level, technology-driven change. In other words, it was business as usual overlaid with piecemeal digital solutions. As stated in Gartner® Hype CycleT™6 for the Digital Workplace, “This rapid escalation of digital work has been transformational, and most organizations are anxious to keep the momentum going.”7
Meanwhile, key tensions have cropped up that affect the very nature of work. Organizations are investing in technology to augment human capabilities, but far fewer are investing in workers’ long-term development or organizational changes required for humans to effectively collaborate with smart machines. This is critical to organizational resiliency in a world where the only constant is change.
The common thread through all of this is the worker. To go from looking digital to living digital, the workplace must be redesigned to operate in synchrony and connect all workers to those that they work with when, where, and how they need it – regardless of location, device, or time zone. Making the shift requires connecting worker experience to business outcomes. By putting workers at the center of design, it becomes possible to create a digital workplace that transforms how people collaborate, get work done, and ultimately do business.
What humans want from digital interactions
- Recognize me as my whole, real self – including my personal preferences, ambitions, and needs
- Anticipate my needs, serve them before I express them, and embed collaboration and learning in the flow of my work
- Open doors to working from anywhere through one-stop access to the tools I need to do my job
- Listen to me and incorporate my feedback in a timely manner through real, transparent, and trustworthy solutions
- Activate new mechanisms for boosted productivity and innovation, equipping me with reliable tools that feel tailored to me
Source: Deloitte
From looking digital to living digital
We’ve mostly discussed what a digital workplace is not. It isn’t a product category. Neither is it merely a set of technologies. And there’s more to it than simply replicating the physical workspace online.
So what is it? Here’s our definition:
A robust digital workplace enables business outcomes and amplifies my workforce experience by augmenting my ability to do work, increasing my ability to collaborate across physical and digital places, providing insights and linkages to my organization’s mission, connecting me with the people I work with, supporting my growth and development, and enhancing my well-being and sense of belonging.
Let’s break it down.
Business outcomes
Business outcomes are measurable, quantifiable goals that the organization intends to achieve. They provide direction, help organizations prioritize initiatives, and clarify what success looks like. Everyone in the organization should know the business outcomes to aim for and their personal role in bringing those outcomes to fruition.
Business outcomes will vary by organization, but some examples include:
- Enabling equitable experiences for – and increasing collaboration with – remote and hybrid workers to increase productivity by 5%
- Empowering a flexible work ethos to reduce attrition of top talent by 20%
- Expanding talent pools of critical workforce segments by 300% to support exponential growth into new markets
By focusing on outcomes, you can avoid reactively bolting technologies onto existing processes. Instead, you can focus on delivering intentional, meaningful, and measurable business results via seamless and integrated solutions.
| Experience | What’s included | Business outcome examples |
|---|---|---|
| The work I do | My ways of working; the norms, methods, and tools I use to get work done; the teams I work with; and how my work strengthens me |
|
| The people I work with | The people I serve, manage, and report to, as well as those I collaborate, partner, and engage with |
|
| The places I do work | The online and physical spaces in which work gets done |
|
| How work affects my life | The well-being of my personal life, rewards, goals, and worldview along with how the organization reflects my worthiness |
|
| The company mission | The purpose, culture, and leadership behaviors of the organization and how my organization helps connects me with society |
|
| The sense of belonging I feel | The sense of worthiness that my organization creates as a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community and as a member of our broader world |
|
| How I grow as a human | The education, experiences, and exposure I receive that support my growth and identity, align to my values, and give me purpose and a sense of belonging |
|
The result is a workplace that reflects the digital interactions in workers’ personal lives – on demand, social, and comprehensive – in their online work experience.
Source: Deloitte
Design with humans at the center
Human-centered design is a way to solve problems by evaluating ideas against the user’s perspective: motivations, behaviors, interactions, needs, and goals. Instead of creating a solution and changing what people need to do so the solution can work, human-centered design looks at what people need to do and creates a solution that works for them.
With this approach, you can:
- Drive behavior change by considering human motivations and needs alongside business goals, resulting in a shift in how people work and collaborate to serve customers better and increase workforce engagement
- Increase adoption by avoiding the typical disruptions of digital transformation programs, focusing instead on an intentional evolution in digital experience that makes change desirable for users
- Reduce delivery risk by prioritizing capabilities with real, enduring value for the workforce and the business, meanwhile reducing customization and the likelihood of rework and technical debt to accelerate delivery
A digital workplace designed to be oriented around people is one that removes friction in their ability to achieve business outcomes. Additionally according to Gartner, "Employees with a high-quality user experience are at least one-and-a-half times more likely to have high levels of work effectiveness, productivity, intention to stay, and discretionary effort."11 Take the example of a lifestyle company that had a culture of working in person. The company used best-in-class physical spaces and digital tools to promote in-person connection and innovation while enabling equitable experiences for a hybrid workforce. The result was a dynamic, flexible model that connected employees where work was done best.
Solutions and capabilities
As an employee, you might say, “A seamless digital workplace provides integrated solutions for me, for my team, and for my job.” More specifically:
- Solutions for me enable personalized self-service so you can readily complete tasks for yourself, such as enroll in benefits or open an IT support ticket
- Solutions for my job let you quickly and securely access the digital tools you need to carry out your duties. Think access to an electronic health record system if you’re a clinician, or access to the customer relationship management system if you’re a sales representative
- Solutions for my team seamlessly connect you to your colleagues and organization. Examples include general business utility tools like video conferencing, project management, and collaboration
Not every solution fits neatly into a single category. For that reason, it’s useful to categorize each solution according to how your organization chooses to use it versus how each vendor describes its technology. This can be challenging because, as stated in Gartner Architect the Future of Work With the Digital Workplace Framework, “Most organizations’ digital workplace technology portfolio is vendor-oriented and poorly aligned to digital workplace goals.12
Source: Deloitte
Technology capabilities
Technology capabilities are important to understand because they enable the solutions you provide for your digital workplace. Vendors tend to describe their capabilities differently, so here’s a common taxonomy to help sort them out.
| Capability | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Seamless entry | Provide you with access to digital tools, whether onsite or remote |
|
| Sprinting and sharing | Boost your productivity and innovation by giving you a rapid, seamless, and cohesive way to interact with others |
|
| Sensing and sentiment | Apply business intelligence, automation, and data insights to help the organization be more responsive to your needs |
|
| Service and support | Provide personalized guidance and attention, streamline worker experience, enable access to physical spaces, and empower well-being across the organization |
|
| Specialty | Enable core business operations and industry specific jobs for a seamless and personalized experience |
|
Emerging technologies for the digital workplace
Because many new technologies will significantly impact the digital workplace – and by extension, the entire workforce – organizations should plan for them in the context of the future of work.
- By 2025, 70% of digital workplace service transactions (service request fulfillment and incident resolution) will be supported or completed by automation, up from less than 30% today.
- By 2024, 25% of digital workplace meetings will employ virtual assistants, up from 5% today.
- By 2024, 50% of organizations will support their employees’ mental well-being with emotion AI technologies.
- By 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will happen via voice, up from almost 3% in 2019.
- By 2030, 25% of all organizations with more than 1,000 employees will invest in either physical or cognitive augmentation (or both) to improve productivity.
Laying out the vision
– Edmund Bacon
When it comes to a productive digital workplace, it’s one thing to understand the architectural elements. It’s another thing altogether to combine those elements into something that is sound, durable, fit for purpose, and delightful to the user.
A robust digital workplace delivers on these criteria:
Source: Deloitte
Personalized & intuitive- Reduces complexity and makes it easy to complete work
- Delivers personalized content to people at just the right moment
- Provides bite-sized, curated information in the flow of work
- Responds with agility to changing needs that affect well-being
- Inspires two-way dialogue so people can improve their sense of belonging and connection to the mission
- Instantly resolves issues and enables self-service to easily get work done
- Informs decision-making and drives connectedness to the mission
- Undergoes regular, iterative testing to designs for continuous improvement based on user feedback to increase a sense of belonging
- Aims for quick releases across the organization and iteration rather than perfection
- Provides up-to-date, relevant content to strengthen people’s productivity and provide growth opportunities
- Creates opportunities to connect at work
- Collects actionable data and next-best actions to foster growth and well-being
- Provides the workforce with solutions when, where, and how they need them – a secure, mobile first, omni-channel experience
- Provides people-centric, personalized support
- Embeds well-being into the work environment
- Transitions experiences from reactive, to proactive, to predictive
- Supports users by providing nudges and recommendations on unknown needs about their work
- Automates repetitive tasks so worker can focus more time on well-being and growth opportunities
As organizations set out to reimagine the digital workplace, they often begin by considering their available technology solutions. But this approach ignores the relationships that individuals have with their work and the people around them. It also makes it easier to overlook where individuals work, their well-being, and their organization’s mission and behaviors. All this raises the risk that the transformation effort will fall short of what’s needed to achieve business outcomes.
Instead, flip that scenario around. Start with the specific business outcomes you aim to achieve with the digital workplace. From there, identify the personas (types of users) and related workforce experiences you need to accomplish those outcomes. Map that information to the technology capabilities that can deliver those workforce experiences. Finally, identify the suite of solutions that provide the necessary capabilities.
Once that’s done, you can determine which tools will need to be purchased, retired, or optimized.
Purchasing may be the least of your concerns. Bear in mind the number of applications that are deployed in the average organization: 88 by one estimate, rising to an average of 175 applications among larger companies.13 With numbers like those, it’s not uncommon for organizations to discover that they already have the right capabilities and solutions for creating an effective digital workplace. If that’s the case, creating the right technology mix is more about integrating existing solutions to reduce redundancy and create a more streamlined experience.
Source: Deloitte
Living digital: Sandra accepts a job offer
Persona: Millennial mom seeking a challenging opportunity with work/life balance and good benefits
From the moment she accepts her job offer, Sandra feels welcomed and engaged. Her new employer has granted her access to an onboarding portal that offers information about the organization. The portal also allows her to complete her new hire to-dos in advance so she can hit the ground running on day one.
Sandra receives nudges to complete tasks on time following a guided checklist. She updates her new hire information, selects her computing equipment, and takes a virtual tour of her office all from one place. Now it’s time to take her child to an evening baseball game. Sandra closes her laptop and leaves.
Later, Sandra wants to understand her new PTO policy. She uses her mobile device to chat directly with a virtual agent to get answers to her questions. Seated in the bleachers, waiting for her son’s turn at bat, she reviews the company policy the virtual chatbot provided.
The following Monday, Sandra arrives at her new workplace. Before entering she is prompted to submit a secure, wellness check-in; only employees who meet safety criteria have building access and are provided contactless entry through a QR code. Because of her virtual office tour, she knows exactly where to go.
Sandra reviews the day’s priorities in her reminder app and checks on her project teams’ status in the work management tool. Then she answers email and updates documents without ever leaving her collaboration tool. A virtual assistant prompts her to schedule a meeting with her new manager.
That afternoon, Sandra’s team has an afternoon brainstorming session over video, using an application that allows them to whiteboard virtually. They have a new idea for a project and engage the rest of the organization through a crowdsourcing application. At the end of the day, before leaving to pick up her son, Sandra takes a well-being break and meditates for 10 minutes guided by her company’s wellness application.
With all the information and capabilities she needs at her fingertips, Sandra is confident she made the right decision in accepting this offer. Her new employer has gained a motivated and productive worker who has been able to seamlessly integrate with her new team.
The digital workplace maturity model
The more advanced a digital workplace is, the better it is at delivering business outcomes, positive workforce experiences, and effective technology capabilities. So in the spirit of continuous improvement, it helps to know what else you can do to unleash the potential of your digitally-enabled workforce.
That’s where the maturity model comes in. A maturity model is a way to measure progress. It allows organizations to determine where they stand today and what changes they need to make to get to higher levels of performance.
The digital workplace maturity model has four levels of workforce experiences and technology capabilities. At the most basic level, an organization’s digital workplace isn’t designed to deliver on desired business outcomes. The worker experience and technology capabilities tend to be siloed and disjointed, with only limited functionality for collaboration, analytics, and employee self-service.
At the next level, the organization’s capabilities are said to be developing. There are fewer platforms, but some tools may be redundant. Further, the workforce experience is somewhat connected across the organizational siloes. When the organization gets to the point where its digital workplace is expanding, it means the workforce experience is integrated across the enterprise and is at the center of design. Technology is streamlined and provides intuitive, integrated, and personalized user experience. Workers have greater connectivity and their experience is more personalized.
Organizations become a digital workplace leader when they reach the most advanced level of the maturity model. Workers are fully connected, and the organization is able to achieve complex outcomes in their digital environment. The experience is seamless, hyper- personalized, and continuously improved.
Source: Deloitte
Living digital: Jake organizes a brainstorming session
Persona: Mid-career professional seeking diversity in his work and the people he works with, along with greater focus on more strategic work
Jake manages a team of people who have different working arrangements. Some work in the office, some are remote, and some work part time in the office and part time remotely. Jake is planning to facilitate a brainstorming session with his team and needs access to enterprise and job-specific data so he can verify the ideas they generate.
Here’s what each level of the maturity model looks like to him.
Basic
Jake schedules the meeting in advance so his hybrid team members can try to join in person. Remote team members will join via the phone (not video) and won’t be able to see any whiteboarding live, limiting innovation and collaboration. Jake assigns each team member a tool to access data since the information is disconnected and it’s difficult to jump between tools. After the session, he’ll have to email the recap and next steps.
The organization has limited ability to achieve the business outcome of driving equitable experience for the hybrid workforce. Further, Jake and his team have a workforce experience that is siloed with limited digital enablement for teaming.
Developing
The team uses multiple tools to collaborate during the meeting, but some remote team members join late due to access issues or confusion around which tools to use. For data access, Jake assigns tools to a couple of team members since some information is connected and they can easily switch tools. He still needs to email the recap and next steps which makes it more difficult to tracker owners and progress after the meeting.
The organization’s business outcome of driving equitable experience for the hybrid workforce is disconnected and inconsistent across the organization. Jake and his team have many social and collaboration tools, but the redundant capabilities impact the overall experience.
Expanding
Jake and his team join the meeting through the tool that’s embedded in their daily work, where they can brainstorm, communicate, and collaborate. Any team member can access data because information and tools are integrated. Next steps are contained within the team’s main tool, which automatically notifies team members when they’re assigned a task or have a due date coming up.
The expanding organization is able to consistently achieve the business outcomes of enabling equitable experience for the hybrid workforce. The workforce experience is streamlined, integrated, and supported by tools for effective digital tam interactions.
Digital leader
Jake uses a virtual assistant to schedule a meeting with his team, considering availability and time zones of the team members. Jake does not need to worry about the administrative tasks required to prepare for the meeting. The tool that Jake and his team mainly use is not only embedded in their daily work but immersive, allowing them to collaborate in a world of virtual or augmented reality. The team can brainstorm on a scheduled, ad hoc, or offline basis, depending on what the individual’s schedule allows. They engage a broader group of stakeholders by crowdsourcing the organization for input on their strategic initiative. Any team member can access data, including embedded analytics. Team members are nudged to complete next steps on time.
As a digital leader, the organization can not only achieve their desired business outcome, but also continuously reevaluate and improve. Teams connect in the flow of work to achieve complex outcomes and innovation.
Reimagining the digital workplace
As organizations adjust to a new normal, they’re beginning to ask whether the virtual environment is as effective as it could be in helping their workforce be productive. This isn’t just a matter of having the right technology. A digital workplace must be designed around the needs of the people in it as they carry out the business of the organization.
Where to go from here? We suggest the following:
- Clearly define a North Star vision and strategy that includes the specific business outcomes to be achieved and the workforce experiences to be delivered
- Define the required capabilities and, ultimately, the ecosystem of solutions your organization needs to achieve those outcomes and experiences
- Build a road map and execute against it – but plan to adjust it as new or better information, insights, or opportunities appear
- Employ a release schedule to roll out new experiences and regularly enable new business outcomes and workforce experiences
- Never stop listening and innovating because the work is never done. It’s a journey with no defined end – your North Star vision will help you navigate through the decisions ahead
We’ll leave you with this thought. The space in which work gets done has radically shifted, but human nature remains the same. As workers, we crave a digital experience that’s reliable, equitable, productive, helpful, and pleasant. The organizations that overcome the “experience debt” that overhangs typical digital workplaces – by reimagining and deploying the digital workplace the right way – are the ones that will attract and retain top talent. At the same time, they’re continuously improving productivity+.. In doing so, they’ll become the organizations and the people that thrive in an ever-disruptive world.
+ = innovation, inclusion, connection, collaboration, purpose, engagement, and beyond…
1 Anders Melin and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home, Bloomberg, June 1, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-01/return-to-office-employees- are-quitting-instead-of-giving-up-work-from-home
2 In New Salary.com Survey 83% of Employees Say They'd Leave their Job If Compensated Less for Working Remotely, Salary.com, June 23, 2021, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/in-new-salarycom-survey-83- of-employees-say-theyd-leave-their-job-if-compensated-less-for-working-remotely-301318452.html
3 Larissa Faw, Workers Waste 32 Days A Year Due To 'Workplace Efficiency' Apps,” Forbes, March 5, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/larissafaw/2018/03/05/workers-waste-32-days-a-year-due-to-workplace-efficiency-apps
4 “Employees spend more than 25% of their time searching for the information they need to do their jobs: Survey, Economic Times, June 18, 2019, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/employees-spend-more-than-25-of- their-time-searching-for-the-information-they-need-to-do-their-jobs-citrix/articleshow/69839496.cms?from=mdr
5 Heather Bellini et al., The Battle For Our Screens, Part 2: The Future of Work, Goldman Sachs, September 22, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ITRXtS8DnE&ab_channel=GoldmanSachs
6 GARTNER and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
7 Gartner Inc., Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace 2021, Matt Cain, 12 July 2021 Hype Cycle for the Digital Workplace, 2021 (gartner.com)
8 Christina Rasieleski and Matthew Deruntz, High Impact Workforce Experience Findings, Bersin, Deloitte Consulting, LLP, 2019 us-high-impact-workforce-experience.pdf (deloitte.com)
9 Erica Volini et al., Leading the social enterprise: Reinvent with a human focus – 2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, Deloitte Insights, April 11, 2019. Leading the Social Enterprise: Reinvent with a Human Focus | Deloitte | Human Capital
10 Building Business Value with Employee Experience, MIT Cisr Research Briefing, Vol. 17, No. 6
11 Gartner Inc., Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021: Total Experience, Jason Wong, Michael Chiu, 28 December 2020 Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021: Total Experience (gartner.com)
12 Gartner Inc., Architect the Future of Work With the Digital Workplace Framework, Jim Murphy, Gene Phifer, 29 June 2021 Architect the Future of Work With the Digital Workplace Framework (gartner.com)
13 2021 Businesses at Work, Okta, 2021 https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2021/
Research from Gartner:
Important Emerging Technologies for the Digital Workplace
Many new technologies will significantly impact the digital workplace. Digital workplace application leaders should plan for these technologies, which will drive changes to the digital workplace and the future of work.
Overview
Impacts
- Renewed focus on employee experience is forcing organizations to look beyond digital workplace application selection and toward employees’ digital dexterity.
- Employee productivity and effectiveness drive business results and must be addressed in order to remain competitive.
- Postpandemic work environments must provide radical flexibility.
Recommendations
Application leaders responsible for digital workplace strategy should:
- Prioritize employee experience and total experience to support anywhere operations that are required by the postpandemic new reality.
- Balance experiences with employee productivity and effectiveness by focusing on technologies that enhance privacy and cybersecurity, promote distributed cloud operations and deliver the next level of automation.
- Promote the pivot to a postpandemic new reality by delivering technology that impacts employee behavior, enables a new model of composable business and takes AI initiatives into an era of formal engineering.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2025, 70% of digital workplace service transactions (service request fulfillment and incident resolution) will be supported or completed by automation, up from less than 30% today.
By 2024, 25% of digital workplace meetings will employ virtual assistants, up from 5% today.
By 2030, 48% of employees will work remotely, compared to 30% pre-COVID-19.
Through 2024, around 30% of all employees now working remotely will permanently work at home.
Through 2024, organizations with an established multiexperience strategy will outperform competitors in customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) satisfaction metrics.
By 2030, 25% of all organizations with more than 1,000 employees will invest in either physical or cognitive augmentation (or both) to improve productivity.
By 2024, 50% of organizations will support their employees’ mental well-being with emotion AI technologies.
By 2023, 25% of employee interactions with applications will happen via voice, up from almost 3% in 2019.
Introduction
Emerging technologies, as referenced in Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends, will have a significant impact on the digital workplace. These emerging technologies will impact your employees; some now, some in the future. We break these technologies down into three major categories (see Table 1):
- Employee experience: Employee experience has been a major focus for years, but with the advent of COVID-19 it has become even more important. A high level of employee experience will lead to higher employee retention, lower absenteeism, higher levels of productivity and engaged employees (those who go the extra mile to get the job done). Digital workplace leaders will find key new capabilities to enhance employee experience in this report.
- Employee productivity and effectiveness: It is important to balance employee experience with company goals and objectives. These goals and objectives translate into employee productivity and effectiveness. Employees need tools and technologies to help them become more productive, and digital workplace leaders will find some compelling new capabilities to enhancing productivity and effectiveness in this report.
- Pivot to postpandemic new reality: Almost every organization made a pivot at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, moving to a work-from-home model for office workers. Another pivot is upon us: a pivot to a work-from-anywhere model, with a hybrid return to the office. Digital workplace leaders must address this new pivot with enabling technologies, many of which are found in this report.
Table 1: Emerging Technologies for Digital Workplace and the Future of Work
| Employee Experience | Employee Productivity and Effectiveness | Pivot to Postpandemic New Reality |
|---|---|---|
| Total experience Anywhere operations |
Privacy-enhancing computation Cybersecurity mesh Distributed cloud Hyperautomation |
Internet of behaviors Intelligent composable business AI engineering |
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
Impacts and Recommendations
Employee Experience
The criticality of employee experience has become even more obvious with the advent of COVID-19. Employees are the lifeblood of our organizations, and the experiences they encounter will determine not only their attitudes and effectiveness, but also whether they remain with your organization or decide to look elsewhere for employment. These technologies will improve and enhance your employee experience efforts.
Technology 1. Total Experience
Total experience (TX) is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by interlinking the multiexperience (MX), customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and user experience (UX) disciplines. Organizations need a TX strategy, because they must continuously enhance their CXs and EXs, especially as these interactions have become more mobile, virtual and distributed, mainly because of COVID-19. TX is about more than improving the experience of just one constituent — it improves experiences at the intersection of multiple constituents to achieve a transformational business outcome.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Use Total Experience to bridge organizational silos. A TX strategy ensures the right leaders across CX, EX, UX and MX collaborate to identify and remove impediments, uncover opportunities in their disciplines and work toward an integrated solution.
- Enhance the physical work-from-home environment. A big part of EX is the physical work environment. Therefore, many enterprises have been focusing on the remote work environment, looking to deliver everything from enhanced/backup Internet connectivity to uninterruptible power.
- Enhance the physical office environment. With the hybrid return to the office in the postpandemic era, office spaces, from meeting rooms to huddle spaces to offices to cubicles, will be focus areas.
- Deliver powerful UX for your digital solutions. UX is a key aspect of EX. Leading enterprises employ user-centered design, design thinking and usability testing on a regular basis.
- Think multiexperience (MX). MX is critical in providing a multichannel, multidevice and multimodal approach to employees’ digital experiences. In addition to traditional web, portal and mobile experiences, MX also supports conversational, IoT, augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences, which are already seeing adoption by employees.
Technology 2. Anywhere Operations
“Anywhere operations” describes a business operating model designed to reach customers anywhere, enable employees anywhere and use digital technologies to deliver business services anywhere. It challenges the conventional wisdom that it is necessary to be in a specific location, interacting face-to-face, to maximize value and efficiency. It drives a “new normal” in which employees, contractors, business partners, customers and end consumers will be remote from each other.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Work with your I&O networking and security teams to provide support for a work-from-anywhere environment. This means that an employee may work from the office, home, a car, a hotel or a beach. The connectivity and security that we have established for work-from-home must be extended to support this wide variety of work locations.
- Adopt a workplace with no perimeters. To do this, you’ll need five classes of technology: collaboration and productivity, secure remote access, cloud and edge infrastructure, digital experience monitoring and analytics, and automation.
- Support physical work environments. There are practical needs that demand physical proximity to people and equipment. In such cases, anywhere operations use contactless interactions (using voice control, Internet of Things [IoT] sensors, smart cards enabled by near-field communication [NFC], AR/VR and wearables) but preserve the unique value of the personal interaction.
- Implement contextualized delivery. The context can be categorized as spaces that organizations either do or do not control. Anywhere operations must contextualize the delivery of value across each of these environments.
Productivity and Effectiveness
While a huge focus on employee experience is needed, we must continue the balance with organizational goals and objectives. Productivity and effectiveness, therefore, are also critical, and these technologies reflect approaches to empowering your employees to deliver even better results.
Technology 3. Privacy-Enhancing Computation
Privacy-enhancing computation protects data while in use, while maintaining secrecy or privacy.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Lean on hyperscale cloud providers. Hyperscale cloud leads the way for privacy-enhancing computation. Hyperscale cloud providers have started to offer trusted execution environments. Organizations can use them to provide enhanced security and privacy in cloud environments.
- Be aware that new uses of employee data drive privacy needs. As more and more data about employees is captured by the enterprise, the ability to manage and process this data in a secure and private manner becomes paramount.
- Look for opportunities to pool employee data. Pooling of employee data will become more common. Another example of privacy-enhancing computation is multiparty analytics, where organizations pool sensitive employee data for joint analysis.
Technology 4. Cybersecurity Mesh
The cybersecurity mesh is a distributed architectural approach to scalable, flexible and reliable cybersecurity control. The goal is to enable anyone to access any digital asset securely, no matter where the asset or person is located, across uncontrolled networks, in unmanaged environments and with devices owned by others.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Manage cyberassets that are no longer in your data center. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the multidecade process of turning the digital enterprise inside out. We have passed an inflection point: most organizational cyberassets are now outside the traditional physical and logical security perimeters.
- Work with your I&O security and networking teams to implement a cybersecurity mesh to support your anywhere operations. The cybersecurity mesh will become the most practical approach to ensure secure access to, and use of, cloud-located applications and distributed data from uncontrolled devices. The market for internet security is under pressure to adapt to digital transformation changes in end-user organizations. Implementing a cybersecurity mesh enables a secure remote workforce through adaptive access control to support work-from-home and traveling employees.
- Implement a cybersecurity mesh for physical building access. Another application of cybersecurity mesh is buildings with high-security sections. This could be an enterprise which has intellectual property to protect, an enterprise working on military projects, or intelligence/military organizations.
- Address your authentication needs with cybersecurity mesh. This flexible security architecture is a pragmatic fit for the awkward access control needs of application-to-application authentication and the support of device-to-application authentication.
Technology 5. Distributed Cloud
Distributed cloud delivers public cloud services to different physical locations while architecture, operation, governance, maintenance and evolution of the services remain the responsibility of the public cloud provider.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Work with your I&O cloud infrastructure team to implement distributed cloud for flexible access to services. Distributed cloud is another step to make cloud the de facto model for all infrastructure and applications of the future. It will impact employees by providing significant enhancements to the availability and flexibility of cloud services, particularly on or near edge devices used in the workplace.
- Implement distributed cloud to support anywhere operations. As most applications are (or will be) cloud-based, distributed cloud support is important to support workers in a work-from-anywhere environment.
Technology 6. Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is a disciplined approach to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many approved business and IT processes as possible. Through coordinated use of multiple intelligent technologies, tools and platforms, hyperautomation helps to build a rationalized approach to when, where and how these technologies are used.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Connect disconnected processes with hyperautomation. Many enterprises are looking for better ways to allow end users to connect automated processes which have gaps. These gaps are filled today with spreadsheets, emailed around, and then re-keyed into other systems. Tools like RPA and low-code/no-code app development tools allow end users to connect these disconnected processes. By allowing end users to do this (as opposed to IT), hyperautomation enables organizations to be more flexible, agile and responsive.
- Enhance your end-user computing strategies. Hyperautomation allows end users to develop new capabilities, reducing the need for pro-code development by scarce IT resources.
- Support your innovation and business transformation strategies. Giving hyperautomation tools to business analysts and other business users enables rapid innovation and realization of your digital business transformation goals.
Pivot to New Reality
We have all had to make a major pivot to address the challenges of COVID-19. Another pivot is upon us: a pivot to a new reality that will become the permanent way we do business. This pivot will feature a partial return to the office, but ongoing remote work for many. For some, their world will be a blend of remote work and work from the office. These technologies will enable your organization to make that pivot smoothly.
Technology 7. Internet of Behaviors
The Internet of Behaviors (IoB) is about tracking digital footprints, then using the analysis of these footprints to influence behavior. It consists of multiple approaches to capture, analyze, understand and respond to all kinds of digital representations of behaviors.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Work with your HR and facilities departments to deploy behavior intelligence technology to support the hybrid return to the office. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are deploying additional behavior intelligence sources at a faster pace. Examples include temperature measurements (to spot elevated temperature, a symptom of COVID-19), face recognition deployments (e.g., to check for compliance with requirements to wear a mask), contact tracing and location-tracking systems (for tracking exposure to COVID-19-positive employees and enforce social distancing).
- Monitor employee work patterns. Another use of the IoB for employee experience is monitoring employee work patterns. This will be as much for managing employee well-being as for overseeing productivity. In fact, employee analytics tools are emerging that enable managers to look for signs of burnout before they become problems. Microsoft Viva Insights is an example of such a tool.
- Use the IoB to deliver a new class of employee incentives. Many enterprises offer incentives for employees to improve their health. Health insurance companies are exploring IoB to provide encouragement of a healthy lifestyle or even dynamically adjust premiums. If these incentives evolve into non-optional IoB-driven monitoring, and eventual disincentives for unhealthy behavior, employee backlash will likely occur.
- Be careful of ethics. There will be many ethical and societal debates regarding the use of IoB for employees. Work closely with your HR and legal departments.
Technology 8. Intelligent Composable Business
The intelligent composable business enables a modular business and technology architecture that is built to change and respond quickly as decisions are made. A composable enterprise is an organization that can innovate and adapt to changing business needs through the assembly and combination of packaged business capabilities (PBCs). To enable the composable enterprise, organizations will need to adapt the way they source and deliver applications as vendors deliver more modular capabilities.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Start to build your composable enterprise. The journey to build a robust composable enterprise will be gradual, and different organizations will travel at different speeds. All organizations will have one thing in common, however; they will find it perilous to skip stages in the process of learning and building maturity. The stages of the roadmap (prepare, build, scale) are the same for everyone, although actual experiences and timings will differ.
- Modify your application strategies to support composability. Develop an application strategy that is modular, composable and resilient by using the Gartner Reference Model for Composable Enterprise Applications to define the organization’s PBCs, which are the atomic unit of composability.
- Prepare to tackle future business scenarios. Redefine the chain of command by creating a network of application functions across the enterprise within a flatter, less hierarchical structure designed to deliver more composable software. Then, connect the distributed application functions by using adaptive governance and funding processes.
- Recognizing that the creation of composable applications will increasingly be a task for citizen developers, empower your citizen developers with low/no-code tools and work cooperatively between IT and business users to establish appropriate governance.
- training for end users on application composition approaches. Establish educator and advisor roles in IT.
Technology 9. AI Engineering
AI engineering is a discipline focused on the governance and life cycle management of a wide range of operationalized AI and decision models. These include machine learning, knowledge graphs, rules, optimization, linguistic and agent-based models.
Actions for employee experience and the future of work:
- Use AI to improve your HR processes for recruiting, onboarding, employee performance and employee retention.
- Deploy personal assistants to improve productivity. One application of AI is the personal assistant. While tools like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are in wide usage in consumers’ homes, they are in limited use in employee scenarios. The potential of personal assistants in the office, however, is tremendous. A personal assistant can perform mundane tasks, from scheduling a meeting and processing expenses to scheduling a business trip. They can assist in visualizing information. They also have the capacity to model various scenarios and uncover hidden opportunities.
- Apply software engineering disciplines to AI. AI algorithms should be managed like any other software, with requirements management, design transparency, testing scenarios and configuration management.
- Establish governance in AI engineering which deals with trust, transparency, ethics, fairness, interpretability and compliance issues.
- Establish a roadmap for AI engineering which optimizes governance and procedures for returning, reusing, retraining or rebuilding AI models across the organization.
Table 2 details the implications of the above technologies for the digital workplace.
Table 2: Emerging Technologies for the Digital Workplace and the Future or Work
| Key Findings | Recommendations |
|---|---|
Renewed focus on employee experience is forcing organizations to look beyond digital workplace application selection and toward employees’ digital dexterity. |
Prioritize employee experience and total experience to support anywhere operations that are required by the postpandemic new reality. |
Employee productivity and effectiveness drive business results and must be addressed in order to remain competitive. |
Balance experiences with employee productivity and effectiveness by focusing on technologies that enhance privacy and cybersecurity, promote distributed cloud operations and deliver the next level of automation. |
Postpandemic working environments must provide radical flexibility. |
Promote the pivot to a postpandemic new reality by delivering technology that impacts employee behavior, enables a new model of composable business and takes AI initiatives into an era of formal engineering. |
Source: Gartner (July 2021)
Back to top
