Evolving Your Digital Workplace: Top Five Considerations

Selecting — or replacing — an employee communication platform can create new, unexpected workstreams for your team. These tools are constantly evolving, and it takes time and effort to understand what features and user experience make the best fit for your company.

Unlike an intranet, you can’t build these platforms from scratch. Instead, you need to adapt an existing platform to your organization’s specific needs — which often means functionality compromises must be made. Whether you’re just starting to seek the right option for your company or reevaluating your current tech stack, here are five things to keep in mind:

1. Complexity

The way employees connect, collaborate and communicate is more complex than ever. Employees’ preferences for digitally engaging in the workplace can vary depending on their role, hybrid work situation, managerial status, age and stage of life, and geographic location. Be ready to juggle all these different factors as you evaluate options to complement your other internal communication channels.

2. Consumer Quality

Whether they’re at work, at home, or out living their best lives, your employees are always consumers. So even if productivity is your first priority, it’s critical to evaluate whether the platforms you’re considering can or will live up to the consumer-grade experience your employees have grown to expect. If not, you risk investing in a platform that people don’t want to use.

3. Business Requirements

Even if you’ve been working with the same platform for years, it’s important to ask how your company has changed. Has your infrastructure expanded? Has your workforce grown or shrunk? Do you need to integrate your platform with new tools? No matter what, the business and system requirements that originally led your company to implement your current platform have likely evolved. That means you need to partner with all the right internal stakeholders to properly evaluate those changes and find the solution that fits best both now and in the future.

4. Stakeholders

Speaking of your internal stakeholders, they are just as important as your end users. Whether they are division leaders, program owners, content contributors or system administrators, capturing their specific needs will improve your chances of selecting and implementing the right platform for your organization.

5. Value

While it’s important to keep up with the constant evolution of the digital space, you need to balance that with maximizing value. Keep in mind that you may already have the right platforms in place and that you just need to optimize them to work better together. Or you may be able to replace multiple tools with a single platform that can meet all your digital employee experience needs, making it easier to steward your company’s narrative, brand and value proposition all in one place.

Your team may have the best perspective to effectively evaluate your existing platforms, but you can’t — and shouldn’t — do this work quickly or in a vacuum. ROI can help you audit and assess your internal communication ecosystem and give you the insights you need to make an informed, research-based decision. Our deep experience with the ever-expanding landscape of employee communication platforms, including third-party intranets, employee apps, digital newsletters and other internal communication tools, enables us to deliver a recommendation based on your highly specific and customized needs. And if you come to the conclusion that the platforms you have are indeed the correct ones, we’re here to help you make them work harder and better for your company and employees.

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