Digital technology has become an integral part of all business activities and employees'daily lives. But can you tell which tools have really digitized the work and enabled the Digital Workplace? That's what you'll find out in our top 9 tools that have propelled your business into 2021.
For more than 15 years, companies have been undergoing a digital transformation. Brick by brick, they are reinventing their activities to build a high-performance, unified and integrated workspace: the Digital Workplace.
By bringing together the features of several solutions in one place, it expands the possibilities and facilitates internal communication, internal collaboration and knowledge management. It is both a tool for individual productivity and a catalyst for collective performance. It is truly the foundation on which tomorrow's workplace will be built.
But before imagining what the future will be like, let's take a look at the applications that have digitalized companies and enabled the emergence of the Digital Workplace.
Digitalization accelerates with AI: according to Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, 75% of knowledge workers already use generative AI at work, and 78% bring their own tools.
1. The intranet, the basis of the collaborative Digital Workplace
When intranets became more widely available, companies began to create digital content to inform their teams, cultivate the company culture and create a sense of belonging. News, articles, videos, infographics, the intranet has become the medium for internal communication.
The Digital Workplace builds on the content and sites that make up the intranet and goes even further.
💡 To go further, find out how to turn your intranet into a Digital Workplace
Firstly, every piece of content can be audible and thus delivered to the right people at the right time. This streamlines the flow of information to each employee and allows them to focus on what matters to them. Secondly, by being integrated with other tools, the intranet is no longer a siloed website. It becomes easier to access and more engaging. The intranet can now be viewed in Teams and communications responded to.
Software to know:
📌SharePoint and Jint to create your intranet
📌Jint, eTarget, MailChimp, MailJet for internal newsletters
2. The collaborative suite
It has become difficult to find a company that has not subscribed to internal collaboration applications. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 have become a must-have in the business world for their collaborative applications.
It all started with Outlook mailboxes, content creation with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and document storage and sharing with SharePoint. Then Skype made it instantaneous. OneNote even overshadowed your handwritten notes and Post-Its!
These applications were already compatible with each other, but the Digital Workplace has succeeded in decompartmentalizing them and making internal collaboration more fluid without losing functionality. Based on Teams, SharePoint and the Cloud, it allows you to contribute simultaneously to a document, to notify a user at the precise point where there is a need to exchange information. You can take minutes of meetings together and IN the Teams meeting without going through an email. No more versions of attachments crossing each other in mailboxes.
💡 To go further, discover 11 Teams apps to collaborate effectively
The other strength of the collaborative suite is its flexibility: the field of possibilities is so vast that it can be adapted to all professions and all companies.
The market leading collaborative suites:
📌Microsoft 365 from Microsoft
📌G Suite from Google
3. Digital communication tools
Lockdowns caused by the Covid pandemic have demonstrated that communication tools are vital for business. Instant messaging, video conferencing, and also IP telephony and mobile phones are must-haves.
💡 To go further, discover the 11 other must-haves of internal communication
Communications media have been introduced to companies in small steps, but have become a permanent part of our daily lives. Thanks to them, teleworking has become more and more common.
Microsoft suite software to know:
📌 Outlook for email
📌 Teams for instant messaging, calls, meetings and video conferencing
📌 Yammer, the corporate social network
When Slack hit the market in 2014, it revolutionized communication within teams and projects. Its strength was that it centralized all exchanges, while organizing them by theme. Instant messaging was no longer just used for informal One to One exchanges, but also to drive projects forward. Microsoft went even further with Teams in 2017, integrating meetings and document management.
💡 To go further, discover 5 good reasons to base your intranet on Microsoft
Not only are these tools wonderful enablers for internal collaboration, they are the foundation of the Digital Workplace! They integrate seamlessly with other applications and create a collaborative, simple and consistent working environment.
4. Project management applications
Many businesses operate in project mode. Over the years, their work has become more and more digitized, relying more and more on specialized SaaS applications. Trello, Wrike, Jira, Asana, or Monday.com are certainly the best known of these. These solutions are very efficient. From the beginning to the end of a project, they structure the execution of tasks and document them.
Another advantage of these platforms is their openness: they offer APIs that allow other applications to interact with them.
These capabilities are what have allowed them to become part of the Digital Workplace. Without leaving your personal Dashboard, you can consult your agenda, view or validate a task.
Project management software:
📌 Task Planner, List at Microsoft
📌 Trello, Wrike, Jira, Asans, Monday
5. CRM
Customer files have always been present, but modern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) gives a new dimension to commercial management. With them, you now have a 360° view of the customer. Thanks to the Digital Workplace, access to the CRM is greatly simplified. It can even be integrated into the personal dashboard of employees who use it as their main working tool.
The API approach of SaaS-based CRM platforms creates this strong integration between the Digital Workplace and CRM. Data is more readily available and can be used by all departments that track customer journeys or sales.
The best known CRMs:
📌 Salesforce
📌 Veeva
📌 Zoho
📌 Hubspot
📌 Zendesk
6. Business applications
Each business has its own dedicated applications. Order management, payroll management, warehouse management and maintenance management all have their own software. These are called "business applications".
This category of software has made a less discreet entry into the working world. Indeed, their integration has mobilized project teams and integrators and has required training for users. A real change management challenge!
These tools are highly technical and have been customized by companies to suit their sector and their company. Thus, business software is often complex and more difficult to integrate into the Digital Workplace.
However, there are strategies to make the Digital Workplace meaningful. For example, each employee can find shortcuts to the relevant business software in their personal dashboard and in Teams.
7. CMS
Many companies have equipped themselves with a CMS (Content Management System) in order to feed their internal communication sites and their websites. This software enables the management of the content publication flow, in particular the creation by the communication department or the functional departments.
The synergies between the Digital Workplace and the CMS are obvious: the CMS will feed the Digital Workplace with relevant and well-segmented content to reach its targets. The content can be displayed in a news widget on each employee's personal dashboard.
Furthermore, CMSs are excellent platforms for collaborating on content creation. Employees can become "authors" and submit news articles for validation. This feature can be used to increase the circle of contributors, and thus create internal ambassadors. For internal communication, this means more content, without losing control of publications or the content quality.
CMS to know :
📌 Wordpress
📌 Shopify
📌 Wix
📌 Joomla
📌 SquareSpace
📌 Drupal
8. The digitization of human resources management (HRM) tools
Company directories, management of annual interviews, organization charts, candidate paths, employee files, internal mobility, the uses of HRM are numerous. They have transformed the daily life of human resources departments and have digitalized employee management.
The HR department has an important role to play in the success of a Digital Workplace project, but the HRM tool itself contains valuable data for its operation. This information will define how employees relate to their business unit, department and work group.
But this use of data is a two-way street. The data delivered by the HRM platform will enable the personalization of content and simplify access to all the applications useful to the employee. Conversely, the Crowdsourcing functions of the Digital Workplace can provide HR with data on the company climate. The HR department can solicit employees via surveys, questionnaires or discussions in forums.
HRMs to know:
📌 Avature
📌 Kronos
📌 Factorial
📌 Leapsome
📌 Cegid
📌 SAP Success Factor
9. Business Intelligence
The rise of business intelligence platforms in the years 2000/2010 gave rise to what is now known as the "Data Driven Enterprise".
A multitude of data analysis tools have emerged. They have become indispensable and have given data a leading role in decision-making. Today, it is unthinkable to design a Digital Workplace without Business Intelligence platforms. Their dashboards are accessible from anywhere, without having to open the software. Thus, everyone has their own dashboards and key indicators (KPIs). They can monitor the activity of their department and their own progress in relation to their personal objectives.
For example, with Microsoft Power BI, you can create dashboards and visualize data easily. For example: sales reports, churn rate of your application, product life cycle, etc.
BI tools to know:
📌 Power BI from Microsoft
📌 Tableau
📌 Qlik
📌Domo
Bonus, Jint's favorite tool: the Digital Workplace
At the crossroads of all these tools, there is the indispensable Digital Workplace. This platform brings together all the features of the company's software and makes it a coherent, simple and practical whole. It is thanks to software ecosystems such as Microsoft 365 that this new concept was born.
💡 To go further, find out how to turn your intranet into a Digital Workplace
The Digital Workplace must be fully integrated with the collaboration platform, as Jint can be with Microsoft 365, but it must also be fully open to interact with the company's entire information system.
The secret of an effective Digital Workplace is the seamless navigation it provides to employees. The platform hides all the complexity of connecting to applications of very different origins and technologies.
💡 To go further, don't forget to secure workstations
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