As work becomes increasingly virtual, efforts to remove barriers to an open and equitable digital workplace culture are timelier than ever. Here's how to start.
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GMB Fitness
Human resources doesnât always have a say when it comes to technology initiatives, unless the initiative specifically impacts an HR system. But the digital workplace is all about how people communicate and collaborate, and knowledge and information access is at the core. People create value, and the tools are the enablers. HR can â and should â take a more proactive role when it comes to fully leveraging technical capabilities. Knowledge is the currency of business, and even front-line workers are increasingly knowledge workers. New and emerging tools in the artificial intelligence space, the so-called cognitive applications, are built to reduce the cognitive load on humans and to make it easier to work with technology and information.
PHOTO:
Denys Nevozhai
Work is becoming increasingly more complex for knowledge workers. Everything is evolving, from external factors driven by customer and regulator demands, to the internal environment which includes colleagues, knowledge and software tools.
To help employees handle these challenges, companies have been providing them with an increasing array of digital tools which further complicate the digital environment. After a while, this complexity starts to have a negative effect not only on employee productivity, but on customer interactions. Over the years I have often traced operational or customer experience problems back to poorly designed digital employee experience.
In short, workplace complexity is one of the biggest challenges for modern workers.
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Birmingham Museums Trust
Mass production allows us to enjoy a vast array of relatively inexpensive, reliable products and services. While the economy still needs custom products and solutions, the trend is clearly towards mass production. Yet building and maintaining intranets remains as time-consuming as ever.
We ve seen a steep increase in the number of out-of-the-box products in recent years. In my opinion, they only provide improved content editing functionalities and provide some data integration and business process management capabilities.
The âproductionâ of an intranet is not only labor intensive, it s prone to mediocre results, due to limited specialized intranet knowledge from the stakeholders. Also, because the content production and structuring standards often vary by each department, the overall digital employee experience suffers and leads to communication gaps.