Ever since the pandemic started, there has been an abrupt shift to remote work. Organizations are embracing technology to optimize individual and team productivity, collaboration, and the employee experience. As we continue to experience this mishap, organizations have managed to grow their offsite employees – working from home or other nontraditional workspaces, like co-working spaces. Many are also accepting the emergence of a digital workplace where work is completed by a mix of onsite and remote workers that operate in synchrony to meet business objectives.
However, some leaders are still not completely convinced about the new shift in thee digital workplace. Some of their concerns are:
- Productivity
Distractions and poor supervision are known to hold back collaboration and derail productivity. There is also a concern when it comes to lack of social support that might lead to high employee dissatisfaction and turnover.
- Relationship Building and Onboarding.
Employees with a weak relationship with the organization might continue to work remotely. Building a strong relationship with them might be challenging and might just end up resulting in the opposite way.
- Development and Learning.
It might be difficult for some employees to virtually develop and maintain the skills and professional networks that they need to advance. There are chances where employees might feel lost and cannot focus on the training conducted online.
- Impact on Innovation.
The unexpected and opportune employee interactions that might fuel a discovery or idea are eliminated, which could have a long-term negative impact on innovation for the business.
Conclusion
Given these concerns, most are still positive that employees are slowly overcoming the digital workplace’s negatives and are being more intentionally embracing the positive aspects of it, including the data generated by workers’ tools and platforms. With this, organizations will be able to optimize individual and team performance and customize employee experience through personalized recommendations, enabling remote work.
Others may not know this, but the digital workplace is eminently manageable. Its technologies and tools can help employers gain insights in a lot of ways. You can measure individual employee performance to team-level productivity to companywide morale, identify patterns and make predictions out of it, track positive employee behaviors, and fine-tune individual, team, and organizational performances.
Organizations should also incorporate workplace social media as it can help teams tap into the power of the entire workforce, regardless of location, to generate ideas and collaborate. They should also incorporate new videoconferencing applications, that are based on virtual and augmented reality that simulated collaboration environments, and others like Microsoft Teams, where users can meet, communicate, interact, and collaborate in a more natural-feeling setting are on the rise.
Effectively measuring employees’ digital activity will provide an additional opportunity for employers to do fact-based decisions. This can eventually improve team productivity as it will help leaders understand and manage their employees. It is also important to let the organization know how you plan to use the data, what they are measuring, and why to minimize privacy concerns. Organizations should not focus on individual performances; they should be able to identify and bend overarching trendlines by aggregating and anonymizing data.
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