Three steps to help drive a successful digital-forward workplace

Your employees use a wide variety of digital technology every day. For some, the convenience of their personal technology exceeds what they have at the office.

And doesn’t that seem to be a disconnect?

Your employees leverage digital technology to simplify their lives. Your business can too. Fortunately, it’s simpler than ever today. In fact, you can upgrade your systems, streamline your workflows, and train employees remotely from anywhere.

By focusing on the ways technology can enable employees to perform better by minimizing manual workflows and making processes more efficient, you empower them to:

 – Increase productivity

 – Enhance collaboration with team members

 – Improve communication with clients and customers

Your digital transformation journey doesn’t need to be difficult or require excessive amounts of time. In this article, we’ll look at three ways you can drive a successful digital-forward workplace.

1. Examine the way you handle document management

How you manage the flow of paper and documents is a good place to start. This involves evaluating your current print and document management infrastructure. Ask yourself questions like:

• Are you bogged down with paper workflows?

• Do you have overloaded file cabinets?

• How many hands touch a piece of paper before it gets filed?

• What data do you record from every document?

• How many documents get printed, so they can go into a file cabinet?

• How many documents get printed, only to be recycled a little later?

Your answers to these questions help you establish your maturity model. It’s all about understanding – not judgment – so, embrace the answers to guide your next steps. When you finish your analysis, you may find:

• You are only equipped to maintain and defend core business with manual, paper processes and some basic digital data management.

• You have the capability to nurture emerging business by leveraging digital technologies and data that provide your team with actionable insights.

• You can empower your teams to create new business by transforming activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities that digital technologies can bring.

2. Digitize data to support more efficient process management

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), “87% of executives say digitization is a priority." [2] The challenge is putting the right technology in place. As you begin to look at ways to digitize your data, ask yourself:

1. How can we better leverage data to improve functionality and provide our employees with more speed to act?

2. What is our team currently doing manually that can be automated to give them more time to focus on strategic initiatives?

3. How can we create a digital workplace that helps to make our employees more analytical, mobile, innovative and creative?

3. Use your digital transformation to optimize your team's performance

New technologies naturally increase the speed with which your employees can work. Pulling a file from an electronic file cabinet from your desk is certainly faster than getting up, going to the file cabinet and getting the documents needed. But the best results don’t come from replicating current workflows using new technology.

With new technology, you want to create new ways of working.

Ideally, you want to optimize the processes of how your people work. For example, you may want to:

• Provide onsite and remote employees with the means and the time to collaborate more easily and effectively.

• Streamline document workflows to reduce time and effort involved with any given task, regardless of where process stakeholders may be.

• Ensure employees have visibility to information and data so they can analyze and inform decision-making faster. 

As you implement new technology, one goal should be to minimize manual workflows. Let your technology do the heavy lifting of menial tasks and moving document from one person to another. When you do, you empower your employees to get more done, leaving more time to focus on strategic initiatives.

The key with optimizing user workflows is to keep your focus on "the how" when it comes to user workflows. A good question to start with is, how do these processes need to change for optimal results?

Answering this question will lead you to specific technologies that best support your team's unique workstyles.

Getting started with your own digital transformation

Once you've worked through these three considerations and how they can help positively impact your business, it’s time to:

• Seek out the solutions that can do it, and

• Plan for the change.

We can help with solutions for your business, please contact us and let’s talk about your specific needs. Our experts are here to help.

You can also read about change management strategies and the challenges often faced during implementation of new technology.