A clear understanding of your employees' needs is the primary ingredient for any digital workplace project.
The primary ingredient for any digital workplace project is a clear understanding of employee needs. More than that, such an understanding is a key ingredient for any successful business.
In my work I often come across false or limiting beliefs that managers have towards their employees. These beliefs in turn influence the shape of their digital workplace and have a detrimental effect on both their employees and their business results.
Let’s examine each in turn.
- We Train Each New Employee
Most businesses train employees when they join the company or take a new role. Yet, plenty of research shows that more than 50% of the information delivered during this training is forgotten within days. And it's even worse with the intensive training that happens during an induction period.
In addition, things change. Information you learned five months ago might no longer be relevant.
I recommend training that focuses more on the core ideas, and that the digital workplace should supplement by delivering information in a timely/as needed manner.
2. Our Employees Don’t Know These Things
I can't count how many times I've heard managers make this kind of blanket statement. This kind of thinking doesn't help your business move forward, because it makes every action seem more difficult than it is.
The reality is there is a percentage of people who know a certain thing. It is the job of management to improve this percentage.
3. Our Employees Don't Want to Do These Things
All too often managers take motivation for granted, especially in a distributed workplace scenario. As noted above, it will be a mix. A percentage of employees will be motivated, another percentage won’t.
The digital workplace needs to provide the motivation for the task at hand.
4. We Informed Them
Another mistake managers make is expecting every message they send is both read and remembered when the time comes.
The truth is most employees are overloaded with notifications. You are not the only person sending them an email (or chat, or DM, or ....). As a result, these overloaded employees will forget some of the received messages.
Designing your digital workplace to focus on and highlight notifications in a timely, relevant way will help employees perform tasks with the information they need, when they need it.
5. Employees' Work Is Simple
Unless you are building rockets or compete in Formula 1, most of the tasks your team is focused on could be considered simple. This can lead managers to conclude employees do not need much support with the execution of these tasks.
Yet, because of the volume, variety and frequency of tasks employees have to accomplish, things often go wrong. I’ve seen some of the simplest tasks achieve a compliance rate of lower than 50% because information is not managed properly.
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