Returning to work and reducing the need for office space: how the digital workplace helps

Posted on 10 September 202021 July 2022 by Joe Perry

The COVID-19 pandemic still remains an unknown that will impact our lives for the foreseeable future. At the moment many organisations are tentatively reopening their offices but ensuring there is social distancing in place and usually with far less people actually working there. In practice many employees continue to work remotely (both by choice and through their employers guidance), but the situation remains one that is highly changeable, with the possibility of local or even a national lockdown at short notice for the coming months.

The digital workplace and its constituent tools can help organisations to navigate some of the trickier challenges around reopening offices and physical workplaces in several different ways. In the longer term, with scaled-up remote working likely to continue and difficult economic conditions, there is likely to be a longer-term need and desire to reduce office space.

In this article were going to explore the different ways the digital workplace can assist organisations in the difficult transition many currently find themselves in, but also support longer-term ambitions to reduce the size of offices. Often the related apps and capabilities help both scenarios. Lets explore ten key areas where digital workplace tools make a difference.

1. Clear and trusted communication channels

Having clear, trusted communication channels that can deliver real-time updates to all staff has been critical in keeping employees informed and up to date during the crisis. This needs to continue as physical workplaces relay up to date information about different locations, for example if they are open, have had to reclose or have other critical updates. In the longer term, to successfully reduce office space, having clear, real-time information for visitors about a location will be essential, as generally more planning will be required by a user to ensure there is adequate space and equipment for their visit.

2. Advanced remote collaboration tools

It goes without saying that the digital workplace needs to continue to remote working with tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. In the longer term to support a reduction in office space, more advanced digital collaboration tools may be needed to support some of the deeper collaboration that goes on within teams and projects, for example the use of whiteboarding.

3. Survey and screening tools and related dashboards

At the moment the safety, health and wellbeing of employees is paramount. Different survey and screening tools can allow employees to help to determine or inform of their need to self-isolate if they get COVID symptoms, and therefore their ability to work at a physical location or otherwise. This can have a knock-on effect on the ability or desire of others to work at a location. Dashboards that display information can also help in planning space utilisation and to identify likely trends.

4. Meeting room booking, desk booking and shift management

One of the major impacts of using office space in the current situation but also going forward if office space is reduced is for there to be more planning; employees can no longer just turn up and expect a desk to be available. This is already the case with many organisations that have already introduced activity-based working. Similarly, meeting room booking also needs to be planned far more carefully, not only to ensure rooms are available but also to provide the cleaning operations that may be required in between meetings. Therefore, systems that support remote meeting room booking, desk allocation and perhaps shift management are required to ensure these processes can happen.

5. Team scheduling

Another aspect of planning a visit to the office may also be to see who else is going to be there, for example needing to be able to coordinate different members of a team so that they are all coming into the office on a given day. Therefore, some kind of team scheduling capability in your digital workplace will also be useful where employees can clearly see who has booked to go into the office.

6. New meeting room support

When you scale up remote working, you need to account for more virtual working spaces within the office to allow staff to conduct virtual meetings with their colleagues who are not in the office. This may mean the need for a rethink or increase in meeting rooms with virtual meeting capabilities, or ones that better integrate with the collaboration tools used by employees working from home. The use of more voice-activation to control or request equipment that helps reduce the need to touch screens may also be useful; we can see more Alexas in meeting rooms for example.

One of the challenges to navigate here is how to create informal places for impromptu virtual meetings involving more than one person. For example, three people want to go and find a comfortable place for an impromptu meeting. They then want to bring in their colleague who is working from home. How do they do that outside booking a formal meeting room which may not be possible? While the pandemic rages, impromptu meetings may be less than ideal, but going forward creating space for informal and impromptu virtual collaboration will be a challenge for office design.

7. Enterprise contact tracing

Enterprise contact tracing that helps to identify any staff who may have come into contact with a person who subsequently develops COVID symptoms so these staff can then self-isolate, is a hot topic at the moment. Several apps are being marketed with this capability and this may prove to be very valuable in helping organisations and employees safely return to scaled-up physical working in the coming months.

8. Flexible wayfaring tools

As employees return to work, there may be considerable changes that have taken place, for example in reducing space, or in relocating functions, or in new flexible areas. Having a wayfaring tool or office map integrated into the intranet or on an app that allows users to find how offices have changed and where particular facilities are now situated can add real value. In the longer term, wayfaring functionality can help to support a more flexible and streamlined approach to office space that for example responds to seasonal fluctuations or business need, without having to acquire permanent office space.

9. Learning platform

In the short, medium and long-term, the way we work both remotely and within the office is likely to transform. There are change management aspects to consider. Here a good learning platform accessible by everybody and ideally on mobile devices can be useful in helping employees learn about new ways of working, as well as important procedural information that can support safety, health and well-being.

10. Office space utilisation tools

Tracking movements within the physical workplace and measuring the utilisation of space and meeting rooms helps real estate professionals plan the optimum use of office space with a view to supporting employees in their work and collaboration, making better use of space, and identifying opportunities to rationalise space. Here a variety of tools can help, including the use of Bluetooth beacons to monitor movements, use of pressure pads and other sensors to measure footfall, and using meeting room and desk utilisation software to check occupancy. Information generated about meetings and interactions from Microsoft Graph can also be very powerful, while Power BI can also provide useful dashboard and data visualization capabilities.

In using these sorts of tools, it is critical to ensure users data privacy is not compromised, and that any employee concerns are addressed.

Harmonising the digital and physical workplace

The harmonisation of the digital and physical workplace is an ongoing theme in the digital workplace world. As the role of the office evolves in both the immediate and longer term, it is clear that the digital workplace plays a critical role in managing and reducing current office space. If youd like to discuss how the digital workplace can support your longer-term physical workplace strategy, then get in touch.

Six bot capabilities and six bot use cases for your business

Posted on 2 September 202021 July 2022 by Joe Perry

Bots have long passed the novelty stage and are now delivering business value for employees; they are becoming an established part of the digital workplace and are increasingly commonplace both in commercially available products or integrated into different apps and platforms.

The number of bots is likely to increase as bot frameworks become more widely accessible and no-code or low-code solutions emerge; here, the release of Power Virtual Agents into the Microsoft 365 Power Platform is likely to be the most significant, allowing non IT-professionals and citizen developers to configure simple bots through a highly intuitive interface.
One of the great things about bots is they can be accessed through numerous different applications and platforms, but commonly are found on Microsoft Teams and even through the intranet. Here, a bot might be accessible from an intranet toolbar or even the footer. Bots usually also work well on mobile devices.
With bots becoming established in the digital workplace and employees starting to engage with them more as the user experience and business relevance improves, it is worth thinking about the different types of bots for your business and some of the associated use cases. Note that in this article we are only covering bots that are intended for employees rather than external-facing bots aimed at customers.
First, lets explore the different capabilities of bots. Note that a single bot may actually cover one or more of these capabilities.

Six types of intranet bots

1. Finding information

Most bots are set up to find information based on questions and keywords entered by users. The bot recognises information may be a on a particular topic or even connect to a wider search, such as the employee directory; bots can also return external information such as the weather. Often the bot may refine an information request by asking relevant questions to get more information, effectively refining the search based on the trigger phrase entered by the user.

2. Forms and workflow

Bots can be used to request information from employees that can then trigger workflow, for example requesting annual leave or ordering business cards. Approval then might be given by a line manager. The bot can request information from the user in different ways, for exampling presenting a complete form or asking separate questions to the get the required pieces of information. This can involve different questions depending on the answers by the user given at each stage.

3. Simple transactions

Bots can usually perform simple transactions that also involve other applications or even multiple applications. For example, a bot might be able to log a ticket in an IT issue ticketing system such as Zendesk and then also send a confirmation email to the user at the same time. Simple transactions may involve integrations with different applications.

4. Triggering and tracking a process

Sometimes a bot can effectively trigger and kick off a longer process and then keep a user informed about its progress, for example either responding to further questions or even notifying them of progress. For example, if a user does logs a request with an IT helpdesk, the bot might be able to provide up to date information on the progress of the request on demand, or through notifications as different stages of progress are reached.

5. Nudges, reminders, notifications and suggestions

Some bots will also send messages and reminders unprompted to users in their chat feed, making suggestions, remind them of actions to be carried out or notifying them about important information. The user may be able to then interact with the bot to complete an action or find out more Where a bot can add value is when it starts to make suggestions based on information about the users situation. For example, if the bot knows a user has just changed their role or business title, it might suggest an employee updates their person profile.

6. Handover to live chat

Some bots are able to be used in conjunction with live chat so, for example if an issue cant be solved by the bot and requires the attention of a human being, the bot can seamlessly handover the user to live chat for issue resolution. The agent will then be able to see the previous conversation, and also should have basic user information too, such as their location and department, all of which provide important context for resolving the issue efficiently.

Six uses cases for intranet bots

All of these bot types and capabilities either on their own, or in combination, can support some key business use cases. Lets explore six of these.

1. HR and IT helpdesk: employee self-service

Employee self-service empowers users to complete simple transactions and find out information, particularly relating to IT and HR issues. When a bot is used as the first entry point for IT or HR helpdesk questions and requests, it can help to drive self-service by linking to information to resolve issue or providing the capability to complete transactions. This takes pressure off busy IT and HR helpdesk support teams, but also makes life easier for users. For example, using a bot on your intranet or in Microsoft Teams means it should already know all your user information (Name, Location etc.) that otherwise you might have to explain over the phone to a call agent. Your issue may also be easily solved with a FAQ that the bot can send you too, again saving the user considerable time.

2. HR or IT helpdesk: automation

A bot can also help drive HR or IT helpdesk automation, for example allowing a person to make simple requests that can be carried out there and then, such as unlocking a mobile phone, changing a business title in a system, accessing a particular application, or topping up funds to pay in the staff canteen. When previously manual processes are automated via a bot they can reduce the time spent on the transaction from minutes to seconds and also reduce the chance of errors; when these efficiencies are repeated across an entire organisation the value the bot delivers is considerable.

3. Enterprise or intranet search

A bot can be an interesting interface for particular enterprise or intranet searching because it can help and encourage users to refine searches based on different criteria or return different types of content based on their preferences. Sometimes the advanced search screen on an intranet can be off-putting or daunting for users; it can also be impossible to use on a mobile device. A bot interface can make advanced searching more effective and also possible on a mobile device, particularly for firstline employees or those outside the office.

4. Learning and development

A bot can work very well relating to an individuals learning and development options, especially when it is integrated with a companys LMS system. For example, there is a very useful bot embedded into LMS365, a learning platform we help clients to implement. A bot can deal with simple requests and return personalised information on a persons training record, for example telling them the upcoming courses they are enrolled on or the mandatory learning they still need to complete. The bot can also help uses to query a course catalogue and then organise enrolment, also adding a calendar entry to Outlook. Bots can also deliver training suggestions and reminders.

5. Change management

A bot can effectively support change management initiatives, particularly by providing information relating to a particular initiative. For example, a bot can work very well in answering questions about an upcoming or current organizational change such as an office move or a company merger. A bot can also be used to answer questions relating to changes to remote working brought about by the current crisis.

6. Digital assistant for employee onboarding

A bot with multiple capabilities can be positioned as a digital assistant that can support employee onboarding, helping new hires orientate themselves when they first start working for a company. A bot can act as a point to ask questions and link to essential information, but also help employees complete some of the key transactions and processes that need to take place. When the bot also issues reminders, notifications and suggestions, it can also help ensure new starters complete all those tasks that need to be done at different times; these notifications will also be personalised to the individual. The bot can also be branded and even named, to make it more friendly and engaging.

We love bots!

Here at Content Formula we love bots and were getting more and more interest from clients. Bots continue to get better and better and are delivering value for both users and the digital workplace teams. If youd like to discuss how bots can work for your business, then get in touch!

11 elements to include in your digital workplace strategy

Posted on 26 August 202021 July 2022 by Steve Bynghall

Having a well-thought-through and comprehensive digital workplace strategy and roadmap is now a must-have. If you want to develop a coherent and consistent digital workplace experience that will help both employees in their everyday work and also achieve organisational goals, then you need to have some kind of plan in place.

Without a strategy it is very difficult to work out the best way forward in deploying Microsoft 365 tools, in achieving digital transformation, or even how you can use your digital workplace to best support employees through the ongoing challenges caused by the pandemic.

We often get asked by customers what should be included in a digital workplace strategy. While there are no set rules for this and certainly no set format, we consistently see a number of elements within a strategy that always prove to be useful.

At this point it is worth saying that strategies come in all shapes and sizes. We have seen documents that vary between two and a hundred pages. A strategy may be a PowerPoint deck; weve even seen one in a video format! The format of your strategy is up to you and may be dictated by standard formats you use in your organization, department or team.

A strategy also has some overlap with a business case, although we regard them as separate. A strategy usually precedes a business case, with the latter making the case for investment to help execute the strategy. However, some organisations will blend the two.

Here is our view of eleven essential elements to include in a digital workplace strategy.

1. A vision for the future digital workplace

It really helps to have a clear vision for your digital workplace and what you want it to look like in a few years. This can be quite aspirational but can also be very specific and should not only include the what but also the why detailing some of the envisaged benefits. A future vision helps to make abstract concepts more tangible and can engage your stakeholders to drive buy-in.

It also really helps to know where you are heading to, meaning you can design the steps that you need to get there. Accompanying a future vision, may need to be an assessment of where you are today. (See user research below.) A future vision for your digital workplace should be a key part of your strategy.

2. A mission statement or strapline

Having a mission statement or even a strapline as part of your strategy supports buy-in and drives awareness; it can help you to spread the word and even get people excited about your plans. A strapline needs to be engaging and encapsulate the value and direction of your future workplace in a sentence or two. Although a mission statement is always an over-simplification of your strategy, in our experience it has real value.

3. Alignment to other strategies

Because the digital workplace strategy positively impacts your whole organisation and overlaps with the aims of various different support functions, a good digital workplace strategy needs to have close alignment with your overall organisational strategy and other relevant sub-strategies and roadmaps. It is also very likely there will be several dependencies to be identified from these sub-strategies.

If your CEO is committed to digital transformation, then this needs to be referenced in your digital workplace strategy. Similarly, it will be difficult to fully execute a digital workplace strategy and get the necessary buy-in if it does not align to your overall IT and digital strategy or your people and HR strategy. It helps if your strategy also aligns to other important initiatives like your values.

Generally, we have found that the more explicit and obvious the alignment the better, showing that the strategy is highly relevant to overall organisational objectives and goals.

4. Key organisational agenda items

Any digital workplace strategy needs to address key organisational areas where the digital workplace makes an important contribution. Currently, some of these are likely to be in reference to the present challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Key areas include supporting remote teams, new ways of working, plans for the physical office, business continuity and the digital employee experience.

5. Scope

A digital workplace and its related experience have the potential to be all-encompassing. It is good to be ambitious, but a strategy also needs to be achievable. A strategy must address the scope of what you are trying to achieve. What applications and channels does it cover? What is the extent to which it envisages controlling the experience? Does it impact all employees? Without some kind of clarity on scope it becomes very difficult to plan and implement the roadmap for your strategy.

6. User research and data

Intranet and digital workplace strategies need to be based on a thorough understanding of user needs, usually derived from user research. This is an essential precursor to any strategy. Without this a strategy may be based on assumptions that will make it less successful; the subsequent business case may also struggle to get buy-in. Any strategy should include reference to the findings form user research, for example the pain points and issues that the new digital workplace strategy will address.

7. Guiding principles or pillars

It really helps to have some central guiding principles or pillars of your digital workplace strategy. These might be between three and eight main ingredients, elements or founding principles of that reflect your main priorities but also hint at the benefits. For example, a guiding principle might be to Transform digital collaboration across our locations through a new collaboration and social networking platform. Sometimes these principles may align with the major workstreams on your eventual project plan.

8. Change management

A digital workplace strategy is effectively a business change strategy. You will need to consider change management plans in order to deliver on the strategy. Change management can take many forms from communication through to training to using champions to targeting use cases to ongoing support to fully blown digital literacy programmes. Change management takes in both adoption and the best use of tools to increase the knowledge and confidence of users in relation to digital workplace tools.

9. Tactics

Depending on how detailed you want to be, your strategy may also want to list some of the tactics and approaches that you intend to employ to carry out to execute the strategy. This may also include details about governance, for example the creation of steering and operational bodies to help guide and implement the strategy.

It may not be necessary to go into too much detail here but listing some of the specifics can make a strategy more credible by allowing stakeholders to clearly see how you plan to get from A to B.

10. A high-level roadmap

You will absolutely need a high-level roadmap to include in your strategy that will feed into a project plan. This may be as simple as three phases each with a year attached to it. At this stage, a roadmap can also be highly aspirational. It can also help to keep this vague as to not to set an unrealistic timetable on a strategy that still needs far more detail to commit to a timeline.

11. Criteria for success

Many teams do not include criteria for success in their initial digital workplace strategy but establishing these from the outset helps to keep projects focused on strategic outcomes, and also helps plan for more detailed measurement. All too often metrics and success factors can become divorced from the original strategy; setting these up at the beginning helps teams to stay aligned to their original aims.

Need help with your digital workplace strategy?

We hope you have found these tips on what to include in your digital workplace strategy useful! If you need with your digital workplace strategy or would like to discuss any aspect of it then please get in touch!

Who are the main competitors to Unily?

Posted on 25 August 202017 April 2024 by Hannah Barltrop

Over the past three years, the intranet in a box market has matured, bringing a variety of strong options for internal communications and digital workplace teams who want to deploy a ready-to-go intranet with rich functionality, templates, configuration and governance already hard-baked into a product.Many of the best offerings sit on top of SharePoint Online (with on-premises options too) and means organizations of all sizes can leverage their investment in Microsoft 365 to launch an excellent intranet in a quick and relatively cost-effective way.

Unily competitors

One of the most popular options is Unily. However, we often get asked by clients who are the main Unily competitors? If you are looking for an intranet in a box product it is important to research your options; products have their different strengths and you need to find the right fit for your needs and budget.Obviously as a Wizdom partner we are going to recommend Wizdom, a mature intranet and digital workplace product, but there are a range of strong options available.You will generally find that there are a number of more mature products on the market that tend to offer the widest range of functionality that can be considered to be the closest Unily competitors. These include Wizdom, Akumina, Beezy and Powell 365. As a digital workplace professional, you have choice.

Researching the market

The best way to research the market is to use the ClearBox SharePoint intranets in-a-box report. Now in its fifth year, the guide is the authoritative buyers guide to the SharePoint intranet-in-a-box market, and consists of independent reviews written by a team of internationally recognised intranet and digital workplace experts led by ClearBox Consultings Sam Marshall. The latest version details over 50 options, with 31 in-depth reviews and 23 shorter write-ups.If youre researching Unily competitors, then the guide will save you vast amounts of time and give you a completely vendor-neutral opinion. Throughout the five years of the guide, Wizdom has consistently received good ratings from the ClearBox team, along with other mature offerings such as Unily.

Common features of leading in-a-box products

Products like Wizdom and Unily have some features in common, some of which are shared by other in-a-box products:

Owned by larger, financially independent vendors
A product that has been driven by continual improvement and investment over the last five years
Works alongside SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019, and can incorporate SharePoint modern and its features such as communication sites (it also works with SharePoint 2013 and 2016)
Produces an attractive intranet with strong, well-designed interfaces
Has a rich set of templates to support internal communications and messaging delivered through the intranet
Supports highly granular content targeting and personalization based on AD profiles and Office 365 Groups
Can integrate social and collaboration features into the intranet with additional capabilities and templates above and beyond SharePoint
Can deliver an intranet that is the entry point into the wider digital workplace through integrations, a directory of apps and more
Comes packed with a variety of extra capabilities out of the box
Can support forms and workflow capabilities to help drive process improvement
Comes with a strong mobile app for access on all devices.

Five ways Wizdom is different to Unily

Of course, every product has its own particular features and there are several ways in which Wizdom is different to Unily and indeed some of its competitors.

1. Wizdom is a SharePoint native application

One notable difference between Unily and Wizdom is that Unily is not actually built using SharePoint, it is a separate application that simply uses SharePoint to store data. Unily leverages a third-party CMS technology called Umbraco. Conversely, Wizdoms base technology is SharePoint itself and it works within SharePoint. This may seem very technical but Wizdoms native approach brings a number of benefits that are very tangible both to the intranet manager and the end-user:

Wizdoms close alignment with SharePoint and Office 365 means that many Office 365 features are available right within Wizdom. For example, when you want to build a page or news article with Wizdom you have access to all the SharePoint widgets (known as webparts), the Office 365 widgets and of course the Wizdom ones. This gives you a lot of power. Want to build a page with a left-hand nav, FAQs, video, social feed and org chart? No problem!
As a general rule, when Microsoft brings out a new integration between SharePoint and Office 365 that integration is immediately available with Wizdom. This is unlikely to be the case with Unily and you will have to wait for Unily to build the integration into their platform.
Wizdom leverages SharePoint Moderns editing interface. This is a pleasure to use. Its fast, intuitive and carefully thought through unlike the old SharePoint Classic editor experience which can be pretty clunky.
If you want to build intelligence into your pages, such as workflows or automation you will find it much easier with Wizdom because of its SharePoint native architecture.
Extending Wizdom is also a lot easier. You wont have to go to the Wizdom vendor or partner to do this. You could get your own developers to do it. This is because effectively you just have to extend SharePoint. This is one of the key things that SharePoint was built to do.

2. Wizdoms Power Panel

Wizdoms Power Panel is consistently singled out by digital workplace teams (but also users!) as one of the stand-out features of the platform. It is a unique, configurable personalized toolbar that canlink through to different applications, create content, display data and even expand to a dashboard, that can also follow you application to application. This means you have a true gateway to the entire digital workplace, from wherever you are.

3. Collaboration governance

Wizdom has industry-leading collaboration governance hard-baked into the product that means you can control your collaboration platform to avoid site sprawl, drive adoption and provide best-in-class collaboration templates to use for different scenarios.Wizdoms powerful collaboration provisioning engine is super-flexible, allowing you to create custom workflow and approval for site creation, enforce polices such as naming conventions, establish central directories of sites, allow different tools (MS Teams, Yammer groups, Wizdom communities etc. ) with different templates to be set up for different users and more. If for example youre rolling out MS Teams, Wizdoms features helps make your platform easier to manage and more sustainable going forward.

4. Integration with Teams

The world seems to be leaning on MS Teams right now and in some organisations that is where the work really happens. Wizdom for Teams is an app that installs inside Teams and brings the core elements of your intranet into the Teams environment. This means you get access to your powerpanel of tools and links and things like news, all targeted and personalised to the user. This all means employees have less places to go to access all the information they need. If sections of your workforce are spending all their time in Teams then this is an essential capability to help drive intranet adoption.

5. Unique employee directory software

When Wizdom was acquired by LiveTiles it opened up additional functionality to Wizdom customers. One of the most unique is the AI-driven employee directory software that identifies where there are gaps in your employee directory and AD data, and then uses bot technology to ask individuals to fill in the gaps. This unique approach is extremely effective, driving richer and more complete employee profiles and also better content targeting on your intranet. You can expect to see more LiveTiles products come on board that operate seamlessly with Wizdom.

What does Wizdom look like?

Wizdom is an attractive, well-designed and easy to use product. Here is a selection of screenshots below and you can see more on our SharePoint intranet examples page.

Need more information? Book a demo!

If you are looking for a competitor to Unily or are on the lookout for a new intranet and digital workplace, then Wizdom should be on your list. If you need more information why not get in touch or even book a Wizdom demo.

Ten ways your digital workplace strategy is impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic

Posted on 11 August 202021 July 2022 by John Scott

At the moment most business decisions are being made with reference to the current pandemic; its impact on the way we work now and in the near future is profound.

This is particularly true when it comes to digital workplace strategy. For many organisations the digital workplace has proved to be essential during lockdown; the successful scaling-up of remote working and collaboration and communication tools like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and Zoom has ensured that businesses can continue with some of their operations. Now things have normalized a little, many businesses are now considering the next steps for their digital workplace strategy.

There is still the need for flexibility and adaptability; we dont know quite how long the pandemic will go on for. There may need to be the re-introduction of lockdown measures and the global economy is extremely fragile.

However it is important that organisations consider their digital workplace strategy not just for the shorter term, but also in the longer term too; most observers think that the pandemic will have a long lasting impact on the digital workplace, acting as a catalyst for trends relating to flexible working, online collaboration and digital employee experience that were already happening.

The pandemic impacts multiple areas of your digital workplace strategy. Heres our view of ten of the most important areas to consider.

1. The next stage of maturity

The digital workplace has matured considerably in the past three months; it is now scaled-up, with cutting edge collaboration tools rolled-out. Previously the focus for the strategy was on rolling out the tools and driving higher usage but this has now been achieved. Therefore, any strategy needs to address the question what is the next stage of maturity on our overall digital workplace journey? Opportunities and choices that were not available previously are now available for many organisations.

2. Business continuity

The pandemic has completely changed business continuity with scaled-up remote working and a robust digital workplace now at the centre of any plans. With the pandemic still unpredictable and with no end in sight, this capability needs to remain in place while lockdowns are still likely.

Going forward it seems likely that business continuity will continue to focus on this, considering the chances of future health crises and extreme weather events. Naturally, any digital workplace strategy needs to consider all the elements required for robust digital continuity such as infrastructure, connectivity, bandwidth, security, collaboration tools and so on, ensuring that the majority of employees can switch to working remotely with very short notice.

3. Offices and the physical workplace

The pandemic has changed the game in terms of the physical workplace; not only do premises need to be safe through social distancing but may also need to be reduced in size to reflect more home and remote working. In the longer term, Real Estate functions may also change their strategy to focus more on local or flexible spaces. Your digital workplace strategy will need to align with your physical workplace plans to ensure staff are supported by technology when working in physical locations.

4. Adoption, digital literacy and support

In the past, efforts to increase the adoption of digital workplace tools has all too often focused on increasing the number of people using the tools. The pandemic has, more or less, meant the numbers of employees using Zoom or Teams is now much higher than it was before.

A digital workplace strategy needs to cover where to focus efforts on adoption through digital literacy initiatives, training and support processes. Rather than concentrating on increasing the number of daily active users, it may have more value to look at how to get the best value out of tools through optimum usage. Some observers have suggested that some employees have simply swapped ways of working in the office and replicated them online; they are missing out on better ways of working such as asynchronous collaboration. This is a key area to cover in a digital workplace strategy.

5. Costs and productivity

Unfortunately, the pandemic has led to an extremely fragile global economy for the foreseeable future. Any digital workplace strategy is likely to need to navigate severe budgetary constraints or focus investment in areas that help drive efficiency and productivity, while also reducing costs.

6. Governance

Some level of digital workplace governance is usually required to deliver a sustainable and successful digital workplace. However, inevitably, when IT teams scrambled to scale up remote working in days or rolled-out Teams in record time, a few shortcuts, temporary measures, and workarounds had to be followed. Expediency tends to be the enemy of longer-term focused governance measures.

However, now that perhaps the dust has settled a little, it is quite possible that digital workplace teams can start to be introduce some level of process and governance that got missed in the earlier days of the pandemic, such as putting in some steps around site provisioning for collaboration tools. Governance measures will give a longer-term focus for your digital workplace strategy.

7. Digital engagement and communication

The pandemic has brought many challenges for employees and managers around digital communication and engagement. This is particularly true for teams that previously only worked together in the same physical location. While many teams have adjusted well, the realities of working through the pandemic requires that the right digital engagement and communication tools are in place to support employees, teams and managers.

8. More apps and tools for virtual teams

As teams start to gel and get more comfortable working together virtually, it might be the time to start to introduce new apps and tools that support more sophisticated online collaboration such as whiteboards. More specifically, there may be apps that are required by different functions. Any digital workplace strategy is likely to need to cover the new apps and tools required that can help virtual teams get their work done.

9. Measurement and analytics

Measurement and analytics tend to be one of the problem areas of the digital workplace; here practices are less mature and tend to take a tool by tool view rather than looking holistically across the whole ecosystem. However, interest in some areas such as workforce and people analytics is growing.

The new scaled-up remote working requires a review of analytics. Not only do the increase in digital workplace interactions provide new opportunities to derive new insights, the change in working methods may also require a rethink of how performance is measured. Overall, any digital workplace strategy needs to look at metrics with fresh eyes and consider new approaches.

10. Supporting innovation

In a difficult economic climate, innovation becomes increasingly important. Innovation through the creation of new products and services, or new processes to drive efficiency, or delivery methods that take into account the post-pandemic world, can help businesses through challenging times. Invariably, innovation is facilitated by digital workplace tools that support collaboration but also help to gather ideas; any strategy may need to explicitly address how the digital workplace will support innovation going forward.
A digital workplace strategy the pandemic and post-pandemic world

The COVID-19 crisis has impacted the way we do business and the way we work. Digital workplace strategies need to consider the challenges and even some of the opportunities that are happening in the shift in working patterns and priorities. If youd like to discuss your digital workplace strategy in the light of the pandemic, then get in touch.

10 reasons why online training must be part of your L&D strategy

Posted on 30 July 202021 July 2022 by Dan Hawtrey

Online learning and e-learning have never been more important. The pandemic is forcing new ways of working and reducing our ability to train face-to-face. Meanwhile the user experience and integration capabilities of learning platforms has been getting better and better, and the choice of deployment-ready course material targeted at the needs of different groups is also becoming broader.

In practice, the vast majority of organisations already rely on online learning and e-learning in some way. However, a surprising number only take an ad-hoc or reactive approach to online learning rather than building a more sustainable and co-ordinated approach at the heart of their Learning & Development (L&D) strategy.

Here are ten of the many reasons why online training should be a key component of any long-term L&D strategy.

1. Learning is part of digital employee experience

Employee experience is an increasingly important concept where organisations are taking a more holistic, consistent, and coherent view of all their touchpoints with employees. By improving employee experience, they can attract and retain talent, and drive better engagement. Within this, digital employee experience plays a role. Learning is a key part of employee experience employees expect to be able to develop their careers and have opportunities for personal growth, but sometimes learning is not always as integrated into the digital employee experience as it could be. Online training can play a significant part of bringing learning into the heart of digital employee experience and into the daily flow of work. Any L&D strategy should ensure online training is a key component.

2. Achieving ROI on your digital workplace investments

Organisations are making significant investment in the digital workplace, often through platforms like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. When you ensure you have learning available through easy availability of online courses through a Learning Management System you are both driving adoption of digital workplace tools and supporting a valuable use case. This absolutely helps you achieve the ROI on your digital workplace investments; in this case it always helps to have your L&D strategy and your digital workplace strategy fully aligned.

3. Classroom training is rarely scalable

Classroom-based training can be important, but it requires considerable effort and cost in terms of premises, travel and time taken out of work by trainers and staff. This increases exponentially when training is delivered to a global workforce. In practice, it means classroom-based training is simply not scalable.

Not all classroom-based training can be replaced by online learning, but a considerable amount can. Online learning is far more scalable and cost-effective, meaning you can provide more learning opportunities for staff wherever they are located. Costs are reduced, and the reduction in travel is also good for the environment. Online learning is also extremely easy to roll-out, again demanding less time and effort, meaning you can also respond quickly to learning needs, a factor which has proved important during the pandemic.

4. Democratising learning for everybody

In most organisations not everybody has access to the same levels of training courses. Because online learning courses are so easy to roll-out, it means it is far easier to give access to courses to all employees, regardless of their location. This means you can offer the same learning options to knowledge workers in offices and firstline workers in production plants or out in the field (sometimes through mobile devices), and the same level of choice to those in HQ and those based in different countries. You can even offer online learning across your supply chain. This supports training for standardised processes and knowledge across global and complex companies, and also effectively democratises learning by making it available for all.

5. Putting the learner in control

Online learning courses are usually offered on-demand, meaning that each individual employee has more power to control their own learning path either by selecting appropriate courses or choosing when to learn, at a time convenient to them. This has two positive impacts; it totally changes an individuals relationship with a course and puts them in control, meaning they are more likely to actually want to take a course because it is of interest. It also means that course completion rates are higher; even if it is a mandatory course they have to take, it means they can complete it a convenient time within a very busy working week. Overall online learning empowers individuals, leading to both effectiveness and efficiency.

6. Driving digital literacy

The digital literacy of employees where they have the awareness, knowledge and confidence to use the new digital workplace tools at their fingertips is regarded as an increasingly important factor for successful digital transformation. A digital literacy programme should accompany the roll-out of Microsoft 365, for example. Here online learning is an excellent way to support the roll-out of digital tools, not only covering how to use tools, but also why and in which scenario. There is already a huge choice of ready-made Microsoft 365 course material available and allowing employees to access these, often right at the point of need, is especially powerful. Another focus area of digital literacy is also around cyber-security; here again numerous ready-made courses are also ready to go.

7. Ready- made online learning covers most of what you need

The e-learning market is very mature meaning that there is a vast amount of high-quality course material formatted (SCORM etc.) and ready to drop into your Learning Platform. This covers everything softer skills, technical skills, highly specialist professional skills, knowledge and awareness and more. With the complexity of roles and related training needs within any one organisation, having access to the breadth of training available has considerable advantages in supporting the training needs of all staff, particularly specialist or niche roles.

8. Supporting knowledge-sharing a culture of learning

One of the great things about online learning material, particularly when it is delivered in bite-sized chunks including videos, is that it provides an excellent set of knowledge resources in its own right. Making it searchable delivers results; for example if is somebody is trying to use an IT system and needs a quick instruction video on how to use a particular aspect of it, they can search the learning catalogue and get a high quality, authoritative bite-sized video to meet that immediate need. Making this available not only solves problems, but also can have in interesting side effect of supporting more of a culture of knowledge-sharing and even learning within an organisation. This can help drive experimentation, innovation and more.

9. Supporting compliance

Sometimes learning is driven from a compliance angle and you may need to introduce mandatory learning to reduce risk, satisfy a suppliers demands around product awareness, meet professional demands from a regulator and so on. Online learning and e-learning is usually the best way to achieve this, particularly if a learning platform has the ability to track who has taken a mandatory course.

10. Supporting employees in the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a massive challenge to the way we live and work. Online learning can make a difference in difficult times in helping employees get used to new ways of working and navigate new tools they need to use to facilitate remote working. In practice, classroom-based training may also not be possible for the foreseeable future, so investment in online learning takes on more urgency. Finally, the depth of the current economic challenges means budgets are severely constrained; the relative low cost and ease of roll-out of online learning may prove to be a sensible option for current investment.

Announcing our new partnership with G01

With learning across the digital workplace so important, we have teamed up with GO1, an established leader with online learning that provides access to our clients to thousands of courses from multiple content providers. Our partnership with GO1 builds upon our existing relationship with the team at LMS365, a leading learning platform that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365.

GO1s course catalogue is wide and covers a very broad range of more general and highly specialist course material that is ready-to-deploy in an LMS. GO1 also offer different options to access the courses. If youd like more information about the new opportunities to access online learning content created by our partnership with GO1, or to discuss learning in the digital workplace, then get in touch.

Ten ways to improve intranet adoption

Posted on 21 July 202021 July 2022 by Dan Hawtrey

What is the best way to boost intranet adoption?

This a perennial question that intranet teams, digital workplace professionals and internal communicators keep on returning to. Good adoption is regarded as an essential prerequisite for intranet success. In order to get the full Return on Investment (ROI) on an intranet and to experience benefits such as increased efficiencies and effective internal communications, then having good adoption is key. There is not much point in having an intranet if nobody is accessing it or not enough people are using it in ways that drive value.

Unfortunately, good intranet adoption is not a given and intranet teams spend much of their effort on activities and approaches that support good adoption. To further complicate matters there are also no hard and fast rules, or ingredient X, that guarantees good adoption. In practice, a mixture of approaches and tactics are needed to successfully move the needle.

Over the years we have seen many clients successfully adopt strategies that have contributed to good intranet adoption. Here are ten ways to consider boosting intranet adoption.

1. Define what successful adoption means

Adoption is actually quite a loaded term and can mean different things to different people. For some teams, it can purely be about getting numbers of unique visitors, particularly when an intranet has just launched. For others it may be to do with the level of transactions that are being completed, or the number of contributions, or even the proportion of employees who have configured their homepage for personalisation. If collaboration or social tools are threaded into the intranet, you may have a different view of what successful adoption is. It may also be more important for different groups such as managers to particularly adopt the intranet.

The point is to try and define what successful adoption means to you; when you have an idea it means you can start to design the tactics, change management interventions and targeted approaches that will help you get there.

2. Use your communication channels for a campaign

It is obvious, but it is important to get the message out about an intranet and its value. One advantage that internal communications teams have is that they usually own the digital communication channels. From email to social networks to the intranet itself, it pays to design a traditional communication campaign to help drive intranet awareness, and therefore support adoption in the long term.

3. Use a champions network

A tactic that consistently works to drive intranet adoption is a champions network that leverages the enthusiasm and energy of an army of volunteer evangelists to promote the new intranet to drive peer-to-peer adoption. Not only do champions boost the power of small central intranet teams to spread awareness of the intranet across a large workforce, but champions also present the benefit of an intranet in terms of the value that is has for specific divisions, locations or teams. Champions talk about the everyday value for specific roles and activities. This frame of reference gives the case messages about intranet use more value; hearing a recommendation from a peer can also sometimes have more impact than central communications.

4. CEO and senior leader involvement

A great way to drive adoption is to have a highly visible and engaged CEO (or similar senior leader) who is actively promoting the intranet and uses it regularly to communicate and interact on social channels, as well as explicitly telling people to use the intranet. Not only does this spread awareness and position the intranet as something that employees should be using, but it also encourages other managers to follow suit and behave similarly. This can have a trickle down effect and drive adoption across other layers of management. Using the intranet for essential leadership communications such as broadcasting town halls is also an effective tactic.

5. Have an attractive and intuitive design

When your intranet has a beautiful design and is easy to use, it is much easier to drive adoption. A modern, attractive, and contemporary design that is intuitive, easy to access and removes significant barriers to adoption is what you need to achieve. It is much harder to get employees to use a platform that is confusing, cluttered or looks dated; many teams find themselves surprised at the difference an attractive interface can make to adoption.

6. Focus on use cases that have value

One of the secrets of good intranet adoption is making sure that the intranet helps employees get things done and supports them in their working day. Internal communications and news are important, but they are hardly ever the main reasons employees visit and use an intranet. Therefore, it is key to focus on use cases such as completing tasks, HR self-service, finding essential information and Learning & Development that mean employees will keep coming back to the intranet.

7. Use personalisation to make the intranet relevant

A well-adopted intranet must make sense to a diverse workforce who want to see useful and relevant content and experiences. This can be challenging when you have a workforce that is diverse in terms of roles, locations, primary languages, needs and cultures. Using personalisation and content targeting is an important tactic in driving relevancy; when an individual can see content targeted to their individual needs and preferences based on their profile, then this can help drive more sustainable healthy adoption levels.

8. Make the intranet the front door to your digital workplace

An important role of modern intranets is to be the front door to the wider digital workplace, either through to links to other applications but also specific integrations. For example, when you are using a Microsoft 365 or SharePoint Online intranet you can easily provide a gateway to other tools like Microsoft Teams and Yammer. Having a single, digital front door is very useful for your employees and makes an intranet essential. This really helps drive adoption in the long term and is also why an intranet should always play a significant role in your wider digital workplace plans.

9. Ensure good content and findability

A strong intranet is always based on strong content and the ability for employees to find what they need. To keep on getting employees to return to use the intranet they must have content that they trust and is easily discoverable when they have a particular need. We could write an entire book on the approaches you need to put in place to ensure good content and findabilty, but they include content governance with standards and publisher training, automated author reviews, possible tagging and user testing any information architecture. Whatever you do on your intranet, make sure good content and findability are achieved as these are must-do items on the intranet agenda.

10. Use measurement and feedback to continuously improve

Continuous improvement is a great foundation for a successful intranet. By keeping on making improvements to capabilities, content, findability and the user experience, you can drive adoption; employees are more inclined to use a platform that keeps on getting better and better. Continuous improvement is not always easy to implement; but starting small and then getting into a process of improvement is the way to start. Using measurement to find what works and what doesnt is at the heart of continuous improvement, as well as using valuable user feedback to see the real-world use and impact of the intranet. Defining what good adoption means makes continuous improvement easier as you can target your efforts.

Keep on working on adoption

We have only just touched upon some of the tactics that intranet teams can use to help drive adoption. We did not even talk about the importance of driving a good mobile solution, having naming contents, ensuring the intranet can be used for non-working communities and more.

At the end of the day intranets need to deliver value to employees, and that is the main prerequisite for successful adoption. Teams also need to work to spread awareness about the intranet and why people should use it. Many of the above approaches we have mentioned cover either one of these approaches. Another important principle is to keep on working on adoption there is always more you can do; an intranets teams work is never quite finished. If youd like to discuss how to improve the adoption of your intranet, then get in touch.

Webinar video: AI will transform the digital workplace. What are you doing about it?

Posted on 15 July 202029 September 2023 by Joe Perry

Covid-19 has driven massive digital adoption and there is consensus that the new/next normal will be more digitalized than pre-covid19. Artificial Intelligence is believed to be central in the industrial revolution 4.0, however research shows* that only 10% of AI implementations deliver the value expected.

Join Esben Rytter, Dan Hawtrey, John Scott and Joe Perry of Content Formula as they discuss the topic and answer the following questions:

What is AI and why is it important
What is AIs role in the digital workplace
When will AI disrupt my business?
What can I do about it?
Where and how to get started?

*State of the Digital Workplace Report 2019 Q2, CMSWIRE and Simpler Media survey based on 450 executives globally

12 factors to consider when choosing your internal communication platform

Posted on 1 July 202016 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

We need an internal communications platform for our company. Where do I start?

Here at Content Formula we find ourselves being asked this kind of question from customers quite often. The technology choices for employee communications are now broad and mature; there are a lot of technology options and product choices. While this is a nice problem to have, it can be difficult to know how to start working out what will be the perfect fit for your needs and drive a strong digital employee experience.There are a lot of different factors that need to be considered when you start choosing the right employee communication platform. It is likely that you will need to carry out some user research with your employees to nail down some specific requirements and then go through some kind of formal evaluation or RFP process. We are not talking about a decision that you can make in a week; investing in the right employee communications platform is important and warrants proper attention and process.

However, when you are starting out it can really help to know the kind of internal communications platform that you are after, for example whether you are looking for intranet software like Livetiles, or perhaps a LiveTiles Reach employee app. It is also important to know the kind of problems you are wanting to solve and focus on are you trying to improve the employee experience or are you more focused on efficiency?Here are twelve things to consider when you are choosing your internal communications platform.

1. Your overall company strategy

What is your overall company strategy and objectives? Perhaps you are looking to merge two companies, to drive standardisation, to achieve digital transformation, to drive efficiencies or transform the digital employee experience. Perhaps you have to meet an ambitious recruitment drive? Perhaps you are having to readjust in the new reality of a post-pandemic world with continuing lockdowns and difficult economic conditions? Whatever your company strategy, the objectives and capabilities of your employee communication channel will need to align with these wider aims.

2. Key stakeholder strategies and objectives

Your choice of employee communication platform will also be heavily influenced by other critical strategies from key stakeholders. These include your technology strategy, your digital strategy, your internal comms strategy, your HR strategy and even your customer experience strategy. There may also be some related roadmaps which have some real bearing on your choices; the IT and HR technology roadmaps are particularly important here and may include dependencies that impact your communication technology choices.

3. Employee and user needs

A huge impact on your choice of your communication platform are the needs of your employees. It is important to have an understanding of:

the processes that need to be improved
the pain points that need to be removed
the information employees rely on to complete tasks
how employees interact with devices
the kind of content that engages employees.

The more you have of this kind of understanding, then the better decision you will make to choose the kind of platform that will make a real difference to the employee experience.

4. The composition of your workforce

Its also important to understand the composition of your workforce and the range of different needs across regions, locations, divisions and roles. Global workforces can be both complex and diverse with multiple cultures, languages and circumstances. In particular, you may have office-based employees and those who are frontline or deskless; your solution may need to be able to deliver effective messaging to very different groups.

5. Your current digital communications set-up

What you already have in place for digital communications is also a major factor. You may have an intranet that already works and need an employee app, or the other way around. You may have an extensive network of digital signage. You may want to change one of your technologies so it integrates with the others, or you may want to look to evolve an ecosystem from scratch. Knowing what already works and what doesnt is also a valuable input into choosing the right product and related approach.

6. The technology landscape: Micrososft 365 or not Microsoft 365

The current technology landscape is also important in terms of ensuring that whatever you choose will fit into your technology stack and potentially integrate with other tools. Often the key question here is whether you are on Microsoft 365 (or SharePoint for on-premises) or not; do you want your communication platform to integrate with SharePoint, for example?In our view if you are on Microsoft 365 it makes sense to make sure at least your intranet is based on SharePoint Online because it offers far more possibilities to evolve a compelling digital workplace and drive excellent communications.

7. Device ownership

The hardware and devices in operation will also be a factor here. You want to ensure the right compatibility with the computers and mobile devices that your employees have, and also whether some employees may have to use their own personal mobile devices to access digital tools. This latter point is often a key decision point on choosing an employee app platform.

8. Security and risk

Depending on your sector, legal and regulatory commitments, and information security requirements, security and risk are going to be a big factor in the choice of any product. Its always worth considering these from the outset as it can dictate your technology choices, in particular relating to cloud vs on-premises.However, there can be a surprising amount of wiggle room, as sometimes risk considerations are dependent on the information and communications you choose to include on a communication platform. There are also configurations you can usually make to navigate some of these challenges.

9. Budget and resourcing

Obviously, your budget will be a consideration here and it will be useful to have some kind of range of what is realistic. However, when thinking about money it is worth taking into account the total cost of ownership across three to give years. Look beyond the first-year licensing and installation costs however attractive these may seem. Does the solution save you any time and money? Are there any additional costs that need to be taken into account?Youll also need to consider the resourcing required to manage it. For example, a new intranet is likely to need some kind of dedicated intranet manager.

10. Identity management and related data

If any factor gets missed in choosing a platform it is considering the state of the data that underpins your identity management set-up. You may have data dependencies which you need to make a particular employee communication platform work. In particular, relatively complete Active Directory data usually fed from a HR system is usually critical for driving effective personalization on an intranet, but not all organisations have this.Also, whether your frontline employees have digital identities usually in the form of corporate email addresses will also dictate the kind of solution you choose; your choice of internal communication platform may need to be able to be accessed by people who arent on Active Directory at all. This tends to be an area where employee apps perform better than intranets.

11. Timetable

Your timetable can be important. There may be a pressing, urgent need to roll something out quickly, for example an upcoming merger. Some platforms are quicker to roll-out, although there are usually options to proceed quickly for most products, for example taking more of a minimum viable product (MVP) approach.

12. Detailed requirements

Ultimately you will need some kind of more detailed requirements to make any final decision on technology. You want to ensure the platform you invest in has all the specific capabilities you need. Carrying out a detailed user research and discovery phase to get those requirements is critical.

Improving the digital employee experienceYour choice of communication platform is important in driving the best digital employee experience possible. But it is not always straightforward there are multiple factors to take into account. We hope this article is a useful starting point. If you would like to discuss which internal communications platform is right for you, then get in touch!

LiveTiles named a strong performer among the 12 most significant providers in the intranet platform category.

Posted on 26 June 202021 July 2022 by Dan Hawtrey

LiveTiles named a strong performer with global presence and a rich set of digital employee experience tools

We are delighted that our partner LiveTiles is identified as one of the strong performers in the intranet category with the third highest score in the market presence category:

“LiveTiles continues to build a global presence and rich set of digital employee experience tools via its services know-how and focused acquisitions. Its strategy is to build a comprehensive set of intelligent workplace capabilities with the intranet as a foundation on which to grow. The vendor has a clear focus on serving large global enterprises and will make investments to extend its platform breadth as well as establish a presence in key markets.”

The report emphasises the importance of personalised experiences and cloud delivery as both critical to intranet adoption. Among our strengths, LiveTiles was noted for its…

“…design and templating capabilities. Nondevelopers have the ability to tailor and tune the user interfaces, and users can personalize their preferred communication channels, such as Microsoft Teams or mobile notifications.”