Letting the mobile genie out of the bottle
May 7, 2013 at 7:46 am | Posted in digital workplace, governance, intranet, mobile, strategy | 3 CommentsTags: digital workplace, governance, intranet, mobile, strategy
Mobile is now one of the key drivers for the transformation of intranets into digital workplaces which could become mobile workplaces. Progress is rapid but patchy. Why is that?
I believe many organisations want to move towards greater mobile access to content, collaborative tools, and apps, but it is fear of the unknown which prevents them doing this. Part of that fear is about letting the genie out of the bottle.
While there are some surprising examples of organisations like Yahoo! and Google reacting negatively (in my view) to this trend, many are starting to test the waters by putting a (mobile) toe in and finding it a warm and pleasant experience. They are not getting out of their depth either by planning what to try out first, how it fits with the wider picture, and understanding the benefits.
How do you manage this so it benefits your organisation and people while managing the risks of bring your own device (BYOD), intellect property, consuming and contributing content, and using apps that are available anywhere, anytime?
It is no surprise if I say a mobile strategy and governance helps to achieve this. Setting the right direction for your organisation with mobile which is supported by the right framework is vital.
Over the next few posts I will shed some light on how to manage mobile devices once people can use access their online environment. What will help you most? Let me know please…….
Big property savings examples in digital workplace
March 25, 2013 at 8:17 am | Posted in benefit, best practice, digital workplace, mobile, research, strategy, value | 3 CommentsTags: benefit, best practice, digital workplace, research, value
This is the fourth in my series of posts showing examples of the savings organisations have made by shifting work to a digital workplace. It draws on my previous posts on how you need to plan your strategy, governance, and management of content, tools, and services for a digital workplace. This is essential to transform your intranet into a digital workplace. The previous posts covered productivity savings, reduced absenteeism, and lower staff turnover.
I will be using examples from the Digital Workplace Group‘s report ‘What is the financial value of investing in digital working?‘ that show what organisations taking the right approach can achieve. This example covers how less, better utilised, physical workspace can save large amounts of money and impact on your organisation’s financial bottom line.
How to make the savings
- Transform the physical workplace into a digital workplace where employees can take advantage of its benefits.
- Dedicated versus flexible workspace – do you need the same workspace every working day?
- Reduce the number of buildings you need if more people are working at home or away from their dedicated workspace more often.
- Increase occupancy rates by matching the workspace to the people who actually use it rather than have empty desks while people are working elsewhere.
- Lower your costs by accurately forecasting your physical workspace needs based on trends in digital working.
What can be achieved
- Traditional offices are expensive, inefficient, inflexible, and difficult to scale (particularly down).
- About 60% of a company’s desks are vacant at any time.
- The average business could save $2,500 to $5,000 a year in property and related costs for each half time teleworker.
- Savings from real estate reduction through new ways of working programmes are making the headlines globally: Cisco ($1.1bn), BT (£60m), Deloitte ($30m),
IBM ($450m), US Patent & Trademark Office ($19.8m), GlaxoSmithKline ($50m) and more. - Investment in the digital workplace is a prerequisite for enabling employees to work effectively while reducing office space.
Examples
- BT’s Agile Worker programme saves approximately £6,000 a year for every full-time homeworker at BT. In 2009, with 10,168 homeworker par ticipants, BT saved approximately £60m, largely based on reduced estate costs.
- On any given day, more than 115,000 IBM employees around the world work in a non-IBM office. 40% of the IBM workforce operates without a dedicated office space. The employee/desk ratio is currently 4:1, with plans to increase the ratio to 8:1 in field locations. IBM calculates that it saves $450m a year in reduced facility infrastructure and associated initiatives through agile working.
- By transforming its sales team from office based to mobile, YELL reduced its property costs by £1.5m ($2.5m) a year and drove efficiency through reduced downtime.
- Through its Global Workplace Initiative, HP has increased its office space utilisation from an average of less than 40% to nearly 80% in just three years. The ratio of employees to desks ranges from 2:1 to 20:1 and varies by job, location, and other factors.
There are more examples and details in ‘What is the financial value of investing in digital working. My next post will cover the environmental benefits.
DW Trends 2013: ideal for DW and intranet practitioners
March 11, 2013 at 9:19 am | Posted in benchmark, benefit, best practice, digital workplace, governance, mobile, research, strategy | 1 CommentTags: benchmark, benefit, best practice, digital workplace, governance, research, strategy
I have recently been enjoying reading through Jane McConnell‘s latest Digital Workplace Trends Report for 2013. It is a feast of appetising information on the latest trends in the digital workplace. It gives great hints and tips. It is also very topical in view of the news about Yahoo! homeworkers and the known benefits of the DW that I have posted about recently.
The Digital Workplace Trends Report 2013 is very helpful for anyone who is involved with the digital workplace, whether you are starting to think about it, already planning how to transform your intranet, or wanting to check if what you have implemented is along the right track.
The real beauty in this great treasure trove of DW information for intranet practitioners will be:
- Trends – seeing how areas have stalled, accelerated, and the reasons why
- Layout – key findings shown as bullet points, graphs and bar charts to easily see key data
- Case study examples – a great addition and fascinating to read about real examples
- Dip in and out – choose to read one section, many, all sections. Whatever you decide this report will suit your needs.
If this was a printed instead of a digital document it would already be well-thumbed through with the corners bent by the times I have been reading sections again and again to learn more each time.
Don’t miss out on this unique research about the digital workplace.
Let the London 2012 Olympics…and the digital workplace begin!
July 30, 2012 at 7:57 am | Posted in benefit, digital workplace, engagement, intranet, mobile, value | 3 CommentsTags: benefit, digital workplace, engagement, value
After a fantastic opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics there is a real buzz with everyone across the UK! People are energised, excited, and upbeat about what will be happening here for the next two weeks.
And the really important thing is how they will be spending their time, especially their working time, during the next two weeks that will herald the digital workplace becoming more of a reality and less of a phrase that organisations quote.
Last August I posted about the ‘London 2012 Olympics boost to the digital workplace‘. It is an opportunity which some organisations have embraced strongly or grudgingly made the minimum allowance for. The logistics of people travelling to work in and around the London area for the next two weeks will have an impact on businesses.
Employees will need to consider staggering their start and finish times and their journey time will take longer. While some employees have to be in certain workplaces because of the nature of their work, there are many who have the flexibility to work from other places for the next two weeks.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of the next two weeks on people working in a digital workplace!
Will organisations find:
- their employees were more engaged because of not having to commute?
- their employees are happier with a better work/life balance?
- employee productivity increased because they chose how they worked?
- businesses were more profitable?
- the digital workplace enabled new and better ways of working?
I really hope so and expect from my experiences to see that happen.
The Olympics lasts for two weeks but I believe the digital workplace will be here to stay for many business who will see the benefits gained and want to build on the progress made.
Why SharePoint 2010 needs to have a good mobile user experience
May 21, 2012 at 8:46 am | Posted in benefit, communication, digital workplace, governance, intranet, mobile, news, SharePoint 2010, standards, strategy, value | 1 CommentTags: benefit, communication, digital workplace, governance, intranet, sharepoint 2010, standards, strategy, value
Why is SharePoint 2010 so widely used? I believe it is because it offers for the first time one technical solution that meets many business needs rather than just one.
If you want to improve knowledge sharing you will have many tools to consider. Again if you need to manage your documents you will have a wide choice of vendors. But if your business has more than one need or can see how solving one will create other requirements then a solution like SharePoint 2010 comes become more attractive to consider.
What if your organisation needs employees to use your intranet while away from their place of work? There are huge savings in office costs and increases in productivity if employees can use the intranet to help them with their work while they are mobile.
Before we can consider if SharePoint 2010 can help meet these needs and provide these benefits there are other important steps to take first.
Mobile strategy
Why is your organisation considering mobile access to your intranet? You need to develop a strategy aligned to your overall business strategy that sets out how providing this need will help to improve the performance. Without a clear, agreed, mobile strategy in place there is little chance of creating a successful business case for a solution that can help employees. You need to research which content and tools are most needed while employees are mobile.
Mobile champion
Who should be responsible for sponsoring the implementation of your mobile strategy? You need to find a senior representative who will champion this or, better still, a board or steering group of senior representatives from business functions across your organisation. Make sure the role is clear, and you have the authority to make the decisions needed, supported by funding.
Mobile audience
Who needs to use a mobile device for their work? You need to be clear which employees will benefit from having a mobile device. It probably will not be everyone. Even if it is, you will have to prioritise who has the greatest need. Factors like the number of employees involved, time spent away from their place of work, what contribution they can make, will help decide the greatest need.
Mobile governance
As well as having a champion for the use of mobile devices your governance framework needs to include the standards for owners of content and tools to follow so mobile devices can be used by employees. Roles and responsibilities need to include meeting the needs of mobile users for content and tool owners. The content and tools must not be a complete duplication of what exists already.
Mobile devices
Will you let employees bring their own devices to work or will you provide your own? That decision is critical and will depend on your organisation’s corporate values, type of employees, security (more below on this), funding and speed of adoption. Once that decision is made you can then focus on what devices your organisation provides or you recommend employees have that offer the best experience for what they need to do while mobile.
Mobile security
How can you be sure the right people only are using your intranet? It is vital you have a representative from your Legal team involved as well as from IT. You need to find the right balance of secure but easy access. It is no good if it takes ages to authenticate who you are before employee can access your intranet. But you do need some intelligent software working in the background to ensure you know who is accessing content with a mobile device.
Mobile platform
As I said at the beginning most organisations are either considering using SharePoint 2010 or are in various stages of rolling out to meet their needs. One of these is increasingly the need to provide content and tools that is needed by employees while mobile.
The problem with SharePoint 2010 is the ‘out of the box’ experience can be a bit underwhelming. It is a text only version which most mobile users of internet sites will feel is like going back in time. It may be improved by the next release of SharePoint but can your organisation afford to wait that long?
Make a newbie welcome and more engaged
September 14, 2011 at 8:23 am | Posted in benefit, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, intranet, mobile | 8 CommentsTags: benefit, best practice, collaboration, digital workplace, engagement, value
This is the first of my tips to answer the question “How do I engage employees and improve collaboration?“. I wanted to start at the beginning, when a newbie is joining a new business, because if you can get off on the right footing the rest can be easy. If you get off on the wrong footing then it will take more time and effort to overcome poor first impressions and may not ever recover with the newbie leaving after a little while.
When someone is thinking of applying for a job with your business you want to give them as much information about your business as you can to help them make an informed decision. Applying online for a job for example shows you have a digital workplace.
When the successful applicant is informed of your decision, you also want to start building up their knowledge of their new role so they can hit the ground running from their first day. So here are a few tips that can help boost their engagement and value to a business from day 1.
A nice surprise
The newbie joining is pleasantly surprised by the secure access given to HR policies, information about their role, team and part of the business they will be working in. The newbie is also pleased they can continue using the internet tools they have grown up with and which a lot of their personal life revolves around like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
They are amazed they can use a forum with other newbies and HR to ask and share experiences and pick up tips on how to do things, who are the key people on any topic, etc. This helps them gain a warm feeling for their new employer and appreciate the effort made to make them feel welcome before they join.
Time to prepare
The newbie’s manager is also aware of who the person is joining. They use the digital workplace to make sure all the equipment is ordered ready for use on day 1 including a laptop, smartphone, email account, access to collaborative tools, applications, remote access to the digital workplace and a desk and chair or booking a place for the first few days because they can work flexibly anywhere.
Communications are sent to the other team members, handover arranged if it is an existing job by the person moving on, and key business partners are also made aware of the changes so they can accept a different voice, face and email sign-off for the work they continue to do with whoever does this role.
Everything in place
On day 1 the newbie arrives. Everyone is aware who is joining and are able to welcome them, knowing why they are joining and how they fit with the work the team does. An induction programme involves a lot of self-help because a lot of online training, guidance and help in on the digital workplace. All the tools the newbie needs are available and working with passwords set up – even a welcome message on their personal portal and email!
The newbie’s manager and team members won’t be bombarded all the time by questions because the newbie has access to discussion forums, FAQs and micro blogging tools to ask the simple. repetitive questions and find the answers on the digital workplace.
That leave the more complex and questions related to the newbie’s role and expectations to be answered with the newbie’s manager, team members or HR.
Accelerated productivity
The newbie has all the tools to start adding value from day 1. More importantly, because of the way the business has prepared things for the newbie, they are very keen to show these efforts are appreciated and want to make that extra effort to show that.
The business sees accelerated productivity from a newbie who is engaged and committed from the first day.
More on the newbie’s first few weeks in my next post.
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