Move over Social Media to Gauge Your Digital Workplace Functioning

Enterprises are Shifting Towards Social Intranet

The use of enterprise social networks for business has emerged as a crucial means of marketing, promoting and managing employee and customer relationships. Communication through emails are the oldest and most popular modes of communication and collaboration in enterprises.

But how many of us suffer under an overload of unnecessary emails and clogged mailboxes?

Using social networking intranet for enterprise collaboration might be an option worth considering while ensuring that important information locked in emails is not lost simply because an employee leaves the company or is unable to manage the vast number of messages demanding his attention.

Most organizations compare digital workplace performance to social media consumption. Leaders at higher level convey their vision and goals down through the organizational chain of workers, with success measured by the alleged employee engagement with the corporate messages. Studies that have been benchmarking organizations’ digital collaboration performance for many years now states that while employees welcome being recognized as a leader, the majority are driven by two purposes:

How to compete with other similar organizations?

And what can be done to improvise?

Why is Social Media Is No Longer a key performance indicator (kpi) for Digital Performance?

Today many multinationals are readily changing their goal and stitching their focus. Example A search Engine asks its team members to switch from earlier focusing on helping find relevant content to helping its users have more meaningful social interactions. Facebook is today well prepared to forgo the short-term advertising revenue to build a stronger engagement platform, predicated on deeper intense conversations between trustworthy connections. Very recently, it was read that Twitter, is considering removing the Like button in to “incentivize healthy discussion” as it is often considered a conversation killer. How do you respond to a “like”?

Perhaps today companies have finally come to the insight that the real “engagement” happens between people, with content being one important factor to achieve, but conversation being a rather more stronger one. While still supporting well-targeted media campaigns, marketing companies are claiming the only way to get to prospective customers now is to have outstanding products that early adopters readily spread the word about via conversations. Marketing companies suggests that marketing messages today have to be inside the product and not around it.

How to evaluate and gauge Your Digital Performance

If statistics are truthful, you will have noticed that over the time your social media marketing efforts, internally and externally, reach a place where no amount of innovative tactics or efforts can shift the knob any further. So now is the correct time to stay back and reflect on what you are trying to accomplish. Have you lost prospect of this? Are your existing metrics really going to help you forecast your increased business value?

Business value can be cooled down to two aspects:

1. Are you business problems been solved in real time? That means are you gaining new clients, improvising on product quality timely, delivering faster then competitors, solving customer issues, engaging employees etc.?

2. Are you pioneering innovation and creating new higher value for your customers? That means, are you developing new fresh products time to time that solve problems for both you and your customers and generate new opportunities for the customers?

Definitely it’s time to rethink what you are doing, if you can’t clearly connect your digital workplace functions to solve your problems and introduce innovation on time to time basis. Its time your company assembles a digital collaboration maturity structure to help your organization on their digital workplace journey. The journey that moves from a social media phase where the digital journeys starts to a “social networking” phase where people connect and engage with each other beyond just merely sharing content to eventually laying the base for deeper and diverse conversations and collaborations that will lead to true problem-solving and innovation.

You may not have to be a benchmarking partner to gain from the use of this framework, so you can consider the following suggestions:

a. Benchmark digital work environments through relationship investigative analytics.
b. Review your current digital workplace measures and locate them against every journey stage. Check if your measures have evenly spread from corner to corner of each stage. And if you have missed some, create, trial and implement some new measures.

3. Try to work out measures that you can draw directly from your digital activity. Having said that, you may also consider using employee surveys to inform more engagement measures and complement your quantitative measures.

4. Share your results extensively with your staff. Look to have employees take ownership of your new measures. Ensure that a few of these measures are also personal, allowing individuals to uplift their own performance.

5. Also if interested, you can share your results externally with trusted partner organizations.

Digital workplaces are an effective and agile work environment that can be accessed easily from any device and from any location.  It carries all the business services and collaboration tools that employees need in their day to day core.  Modern workplace targets at a consumer-like experiences for employees thus proving them a vibrant workplace solution. The 2019 digital workplace focuses on ease of use, empowering employees towards technology, so that they perform to their full potential and collaborate more easily than ever before. Creative digital workplace services can help companies lower their operating costs as they leverage collaborative spaces with flexible intranet solutions provided by Creative.

At the end, it is the improvement practices you learn about from others that will aid you achieve your company goals.