How to accelerate digital adoption?

Digital workplaces are created to support innovative working practices and give employees the digital proficiency they need to advance business objectives like digital transformation. The issue is that not enough workers are aware of or committed to the leader's vision for the applications.

IT executives may need to get rid of antiquated ideas about workplace technology and engage with key stakeholders more actively to hear their concerns and demonstrate the practical advantages of adopting digital workplace strategies.

The digital workplace

The digital workplace includes applications, devices, facilities, and enabling services that improve digital dexterity and power new ways of working — all while improving employee experience and engagement.

Digital dexterity, as defined by Gartner, is the capacity and desire of employees to exploit existing and emerging technologies to drive business outcomes fully. It is becoming more and more crucial as the digital component of the majority of jobs increases. Therefore, effective digital workplace strategies must create a stimulating and user-friendly working environment that will increase digital dexterity.

Despite this convincing argument favoring the digital workplace, many IT leaders find it difficult to inspire enthusiasm for, let alone adopt and utilize, key workplace technologies.

The secret to success is proving that digital workplace technology can improve employees' lives by enhancing their day-to-day tasks or better preparing them to perform well during digital transformation when processes and working methods change.

However, IT leaders will need to consider whether their assumptions regarding office technology are still valid. It might be time to change your perspective if you hold common misconceptions like the three listed here that prevent you from appealing to office tech users.

Technology adoption requires a cultural change

Many organizations still conduct business and make decisions when everyone is seated in an office. For instance, video meeting applications and visual collaboration software are widely used, but most businesses still mimic earlier forms of communication and collaboration. They are passing up the chance to fully alter processes to benefit from investments in digital workplace technology and introduce new modes of operation.

Show instead how staff members can use workstream collaboration tools to attend fewer meetings or reduce the number of meetings they need by utilizing meeting recordings and transcriptions.

Asynchronous collaboration

Despite the rise of distributed teams, many business leaders continue to view collaboration through a synchronous lens, presuming that it works best when team members are in the same location or using the same application and working on the same task. However, according to Gartner's research, asynchronous modes of collaboration are just as crucial to achieving high team innovation, if not more so, particularly in a hybrid world where work schedules frequently overlap less.

Consider using what Gartner refers to as the "New Work Hub" as a model for choosing and combining applications and capabilities to enable the flexibility required by new ways of working, particularly around collaboration, to support and enable these future-of-work trends.

Assess the needs of each functional department, business unit, and employee group when determining the workplace capabilities needed. For instance, distinct capabilities may be needed for customer support services to communicate with, share, and receive documents from clients. Data privacy must also be guaranteed, and compliance and security must be integrated for secure external collaboration.

The most effective way to increase adoption is to foster a culture of technological curiosity and sharing, where team members support one another in developing their digital skills by demonstrating how applications enhance results at work. According to the Gartner 2021 CIO Technology Skills Outside of IT survey, peer learning is the preferred method for employee skill development.

Empowering citizen developers

As a result of the accessibility and strength of low-code and "no code" development tools, corporate IT-approved development tools and runtime environments are now available to citizen developers and other business technologists to create new business applications. Think twice if you're still dismissing this type of activity as "risky shadow IT."

With an in-depth understanding of business operations, citizen developers can directly support various organizational goals and enhance operational efficiency, decision-making, and customer-facing skills. They carry out a wide range of tasks formerly handled by IT, including integrating data and designing analytical models, creating and training algorithms, building or customizing user interfaces, and creating new and improving existing software functionalities.

Embracing business-led technology delivery is crucial to accelerating and scaling digital transformation and extending meaningful workplace technologies.