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Building the right workplace experience is critical to every enterprise’s overall productivity, culture, and efficiency. When your organization realizes the necessity of building out and reinforcing your workplace experience, you need to assess your specific challenges and map a viable solution to solve them. What will this experience be for your employees? How will it come to life? What will people use most? What will actually make our people more productive? How will everyone collaborate better?
During this decision-making process, enterprises will come across a wide array of solutions and need to decide whether they use existing technology, invest in an ‘out-of- the-box’ product, or develop a digital workplace roadmap aimed at transforming the overall employee experience. When going through this process, it is important to understand the difference between a product and a platform in this “digital workplace” world.
A modern workplace product is viewed as an ‘out-of-the-box’ templated solution designed to get organizations up and running quickly with an accelerated time-to-value. However, these types of solutions tend to be limited in their ability to scale to meet more complex user requirements. This is troublesome for organizations with expansive requirements as these solutions tend to be limited to what they provide off the shelf leaving larger enterprises stuck with an incomplete solution and an inability to modify the solution to meet their specific needs, integration points, or branding requirements.
A built-out, customized modern workplace platform integrates with other technology to meet the needs of the entire workforce. This can encompass the vision journey of an organization’s ongoing digital workplace goals and continuous evolution of the different experiences that the organization wants to deliver. This focuses on delivering unique, value- added workplace experiences to every user – tying together all of the tools required to do their job more effectively – regardless of who a user is and what location, device, and language they operate within. Unlike products, platforms are highly scalable but require investment and resources to maintain.
Businesses can realize a faster time-to-value with an out-of-the-box solution that provides a starting point to expand the current digital workplace into a full-fledged platform that meets employee expectations. Popular applications can quickly be abandoned by employees as either employees’ needs change or the company grows.
Like any successful journey, workplace transformation is not intended to be a single implementation but rather a phased plan that continually builds upon the employee experience with gradual and consistent execution of solutions based on employee needs and ongoing evaluation and feedback. To deploy a solution that gets used and adopted by employees the workplace experience solution must have the ability to provide value to employees continuously.