Whether they realize it or not, today’s organizations are finding themselves in the midst of a transition to a digital workplace. With communication, collaboration, and work management tools firmly in hand, employees can search for information, create and share content, analyze data, and schedule work-related activities, as well as participate in meetings and collaborate with teams virtually. Numerous as they are diverse, they satisfy practically every work demand and expectation.
Indeed, the procurement of these digital tools has spread steadily outside the realm of IT, across businesses. Disparate technologies, spanning content, communication, and task coordination, have made for a more communicative – and completely unified – office environment. What that means is there are far fewer work silos, which only serve to restrain cross-functional performance.
Further enablement of technology, then, is critically important to today’s workplace. It encourages employees’ digital dexterity. It requires that business leadership promotes digital workplace initiatives – and new ways of working altogether.
Coronavirus’ effect on the workplace
Without question, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has meant that many people must now work from home (WFH). And legal professionals are no exception. As a result, there is now a heavy emphasis on all things “digital.” By those keeping a watchful eye on legal and other sectors, this kind of transformation in offices could be viewed as moving from being “analog-digital” to “digital-analog.” The team-sharing software and communication tools – take contract management systems (CMS), for instance – will soon be the mainstay of workplaces, whether or not they are remote. In other words, you can expect to spend an increasing amount of your professional time – in the digital realm.
Not Your Parents’ Office
Even before the COVID-19 crisis, though, the adoption and implementation of digital technologies created workplaces that are more digitally focused than human-focused. They are easily distinguished from more traditional – or “analog-analog” – offices, in which neither the tools that employees use nor the spaces they work in are digital in any significant way. The latter is a workplace in which you can touch everything – from the desk where employees sit at, to the paper that needs to be filed away in drawers and cabinets. All of this telegraphs a rather analog corporation.
The onset of digital technologies has changed the very spaces and ways in which people work, making them far more flexible and open than previously. But they did not take away the importance of human-focused spaces. Here, the physicality of the office, itself, is stressed. So is the sociality – bringing people together all in one place for professional learning and growth. And this, of course, was all well and good up until now.
Corporate culture change
Doing things digitally is quickly becoming ‘business as usual,’ as stated above. In fact, the majority of organizations have moved beyond merely designing digital business initiatives to delivering actual results, according to Gartner’s 2020 CIO Survey. In it, 40 percent of survey respondents revealed their interest in scaling or refining their digital business initiatives. That is because they expect that digital technology will transform their industry – however substantially – within the next five years.
“The workforce,” Gartner said, “is either one of the fundamental pillars of such digital transformation or an unreliable foundation.” A majority of respondents in the same board of directors survey – or 65 percent – expect a corporate culture change thanks to their digital transformation. Still, nearly half of all respondents consider workforce issues – think talent acquisition, development, and retention – as one of their biggest challenges at the moment. That is only after technology disruption.
Acknowledging that successful digital transformation means a digitally dexterous workforce, many organizations already have in place digital workplace programs. But leaders of digital workplace programs are only at the beginning of the digital transformation journey. Their efforts remain uncoordinated, by and large, and informal initiatives have yet to evolve into formal ones.
Digital workplace programs
In another recent report, “Digital Workplace Program Primer for 2020,” Gartner pointed out that every organization has a digital workplace today. And most have aims to build upon their current systems. “Application leaders in charge of such programs must now focus on scaling them, on aligning them closely with their organization’s digital business ambitions, and on demonstrating their impact,” it said.
In essence, a digital workplace program is meant to “boost workforce digital dexterity through an engaging and intuitive work environment,” according to Gartner. It includes:
*Strategy planning and business alignment – This helps digital workplace leaders to identify, define, prioritize, and communicate digital workplace capabilities. It also helps them to oversee program strategy, along with other relevant business stakeholders.
*Employee experience and governance – This equips digital workplace leaders with individual frameworks, and these are used to create their digital workplace roadmaps. This not only includes best practices, but methods of improving digital employee experience – to maximize digital dexterity and engagement.
*Change management, metrics, and operations – This guides digital workplace leaders as they transition to responsive, agile, and metrics-driven operating models for their digital workplace programs.
So, moving forward, organizational leaders should ask themselves how they can set up a digital workplace program. Yet, it must be one optimized for continuous delivery and responsiveness to change. How can they measure or benchmark digital workplace progress and its impact on the business? Ultimately, how can they manage change to business capabilities, especially when they affect employees’ work?
The corporate world, particularly legal, may not be one in which work is done completely digitally. Nevertheless, the creative solutions brought to the foreground have the potential to change that analog-digital way of thinking to a digital-analog – and perhaps a digital-digital – state of mind.
Viraj Chaudhary leads ContractPodAi’s operations at global level and is in charge of ensuring maximum value creation for the company’s key stakeholders across various functions. Read his full bio here.
