Digital Workplace Group’s “Digital Workplace of the Year 2019” awards were announced earlier in the month, designed to “…celebrate organizations and practitioners who have excelled in creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments”. DWG are renowned as experts in the field, so it’s interesting to examine what they consider crème de la crème of digital workplaces.
American Express and Barclays both cinched awards at the event, as winners and runners up respectively. Both were commended for their digital transformation strategy and implementation, features of the digital workplace, levels of user engagement and benefits to the company and its employees, with American Express garnering significant praise for their strategy and governance.
American Express’ winner is called The Square, and it is really hip to be square…. by using a completely off-the-shelf Jive instance for your Intranet. Excuse the pun, but where is the innovation?
Jive 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 Digital 👏 Workplace.
But whilst reading about the digital workplace offerings from American Express and Barclays, I can’t help but feel disappointed. These should be examples of digital workplaces leading the way, the bleeding edge of employee engagement — but they’re not. American Express have almost gone to the other extreme of the ‘too many tools, too little focus on people’ scale; technology seems to have taken a back seat to make room for governance and metrics.
Once you look past the marketing speak and glossy mockups (I see you, lorem ipsum!), it’s still just an intranet with a fresh coat of paint. If I didn’t know any better, I could imagine SharePoint with enough bolted-on components to make IT cry tears of blood. The only difference is that they’re keeping a closer eye on user engagement — and even then, is adoption the really the best KPI for ‘digital workplace’ success? 🤔
Putting aside the issue of cultural change for a moment (and this is, in my opinion, the overarching reason both American Express and Barclays received recognition), let’s focus on the technology. Both American Express and Barclays intranets look remarkably similar. They have a news feed, some quick links and some community forums. This is not new or groundbreaking; there is no new value-add. All the user engagement in the world isn’t going to make a typical intranet more functional, nor is it going to improve your employee experience.
I see you lorem ipsum!
Whilst Barclays Digital Workplace looks fairly polished and has a strong family resemblance to their corporate identity… upon closer inspection of the screenshot one cannot help but discover that it is probably fake.
I mean, there is so much lorem ipsum that, at best, we’re looking at a sandbox environment (even though one might suspect rightfully that Photoshop magic was involved).
How you can win an award for best Digital Workplace with that is more than a little surprising.
The focus on the tools and technology people need to perform their roles is close to absent. There are so many organizations with siloed teams who use specific collaboration tools, software and web apps, whose needs aren’t being considered. Personalizing the company news in your intranet based on the user’s location is of course a good thing, but making technology accessible and available to everyone will reap drastically more benefits. How can an organization say they’re supporting their users digitally if all that really means is easy access to a company knowledge base?
Future trends for the digital workplace
Organizations like American Express and Barclays are pioneering in terms of a cultural shift. By putting the focus back on the users, valuable steps are being taken towards a future of work where everything is accessible, digital and connected. I can only hope this trend catches on like wildfire, because it’s desperately needed.
As for the intranet… Honestly, I’m glad that the intranet has become a part of something bigger. Intranets were never a bad idea, just woefully organized and typically underused or even ignored (though through a modern lens, that’s not surprising — as I said before, intranets were never designed to be a full digital workplace). But I don’t think that intranets are in the long-term future plan for digital transformation; at least, not unless they change drastically.
As businesses become more adept at encouraging cultural change and a digital mindset, I think focus is going to shift to improving the technological aspects of a digital workplace. By that, I don’t mean ‘throwing more tools onto the tech stack’, because I think that creates far more problems than it solves. Instead, intranets will evolve into something more — not just a place to gather resources, but a place where work actually happens — no matter what your role in the organization is.
