Currently, we are facing challenges of the modern workplace having to do with an unprecedented digital transformation. Digitalization challenges brought on by communication difficulties, technological knowledge gaps, and limitations of software tools are seen all over the digital landscape. Rather than backing down, however, workplaces are rising to the challenge and attempting to innovate solutions to these obstacles.
There is a push and pull to digital workplace challenges. For every innovation comes a new obstacle that businesses must overcome. Complicated digital tools can be a way to solve a problem, or they can add to the complexity of a team member's job, thus compounding the issue.
You know your teams need to be agile and resilient to succeed. You also know that you need digital tools to keep your workers organized and enhance communication. This is not an HR challenge or an IT challenge. It is a digital workplace challenge and one that must be solved to be successful in today's workplace. With 69 percent of employees wanting to work remotely and 95 percent of businesses relying on digital workspaces, there has never been a time when solutions to digitalization challenges were so important.
This guide will look at the top digital workplace challenges faced in today's world and offer the solution to becoming more agile.
A digital workplace is a cloud-based work platform that allows the work environment as a whole to be moved to the virtual space. A workplace encapsulate everything you or your company might need to get your work done, a workplace is a lot more than a workspace.
One of the major digital workplace challenges is complexity. Workplaces often have numerous software packages that are not designed to work together, all trying to assist workers with their job. Not only do your workers need to learn how to use these packages to do their job, but they also must navigate secure passwords and understand how the software interrelates. In the end, this causes a great deal of complexity as your teams try to navigate through their online workflows. You could hire workers who understand technology better, but hiring new workers instead of retaining staff is an expensive proposition. There needs to be a way to lower complexity so that productivity can increase.
Many of the digital workplace challenges businesses are facing are unique. Unfortunately, there is no guidebook on how to handle these problems. This means that often solving problems can be a trial and error process. This uncertainty in the executive suite reaches down to your workers as well. Learning a new piece of software only to discover it lacks key features needed to perform the job is a common problem during this digital transformation. Finding and being happy with a digital solution that workers know they will be using for the foreseeable future will help to solve this problem.
Over half of respondents to a 2019 study said they felt disconnected from their workplace, and some studies suggest that the number is rising rather than dwindling. Of course, you know that effective communication is the answer to avoid this problem but sending more emails to an already crowded inbox only increases the problem. To find a solution, you must not only communicate with your employees but engage their attention, as well assist them in prioritizing their time and resources.
Your workers need to buy into your vision to make digital transformation a success. Just as you must buy into the larger corporate vision. However, humans are risk-averse and don't like the jobs they've been doing changing as quickly as you need to change. Much of this confidence is up to the leaders. If workers see their managers navigating risk and change, they are more likely to feel capable of handling it as well. Workers must trust their managers, and you, in your position as manager, must feel comfortable to pivot as the environment changes.
Silos aren't just a digital transformation problem; they're a company-wide communication problem; however, they have been worsened by digital workplace challenges. As teams participate in individual meetings, the information created by that team has trouble being disseminated through the rest of the organization, causing a lack of alignment between the teams and the rest of the organization. The answer is to standardize solutions as much as possible, Create spaces where teams can share information, and formulate a standardized format where data can be shared. Creating time within the workday for teams to align with other teams and finally for teams to report back to you.
Most people that work online generally use three different kinds of tools — communication tools (often Slack or Zoom), task/productivity/project management tools (Trello, Asana, Jira, etc.), and file/asset storing/sharing tools (Dropbox or Google Drive). Desktop.com is a file sharing, storage, workspace organizer, password manager, and communication tool all in one. It offers a way to organize your productivity tools better and offers a secure way to access them even if personal devices are used (through MFA and SSO etc.), as well as offering access overview and management. Desktop is the answer to the digital workplace challenges that are faced in today's world. Check out the key features offered by Desktop.com and how they can change your digital workplace today!
