What do successful digital workplace projects have in common? This one thing …

[Lin_Nease]

As businesses adjust the hybrid workplace strategies they pulled together in the early days of the pandemic, it’s a good time to ask what’s working best. Hint: transformation is a team sport.

What comes to mind when you think about what drives success for a hybrid workplace initiative? It might be choosing the right technologies, ensuring strong cybersecurity, adopting a robust management of change program … all of those are important keys to success, no question. But here’s one you might not have given much thought to: cross-department collaboration.

According to a new report from Emerald Research Group, “organizations that successfully navigated the shift to a hybrid workplace all shared one thing in common: they had fostered critical cross-departmental alliances to guide and implement their transformation efforts designed to accelerate growth and productivity.” You can download the report here: The reinvention of the workplace: Developing a strategy for new cross departmental collaboration.

When you think about it, that totally makes sense. Digital workplace implementations are extensive, touching many departments and users. (See: What is digital workplace.) As the report notes, they affect “departments ranging from facilities to finance, from legal to sales, and everything in between to ideate, empower and manage their new modern workforce.”

The study provides a useful explanation of how companies are achieving this new level of partnership, and looks at two dominant styles of transition: IT-led and HR-led. Another thing that caught my eye was the comments from survey respondents, scattered throughout the paper, which provide valuable insights into the transition experience from leaders in a range of functions. For example, a financial planning and accounting professional says:

“In our IT roadmap, we were moving away from physical data centers to cloud-based data centers … A lot of those things that we initially thought you had to have a physical presence there, we found out that you really didn’t.”

Or how about this from a VP of corporate real estate, who has clearly put some thought into a challenge that a lot of companies are tackling right now – how to make physical workspaces more engaging in the era of remote work:

“On any given day, we’re going to have 30% of our employees working from home. So, from our culture perspective, we want people to come to the office every so often, but they’re not going to come to an empty office. The power of hoteling and the hybrid space is new. We were already working on making our spaces more open and more collaborative, but this is really going to accelerate it, because now that really makes a lot more sense.”

The report packs a lot of information into a dozen or so pages. You might want to read it alongside this HPE infographic: Keeping Up with the Evolving Workplace. It’s an at-a-glance summary of the state of play in the digital workplace. It covers some important topics, including the nine emerging trends that are shaping the future of work; pressing priorities for the evolving workplace (see the snippet below); and a handful of workplace transformation “blockers” that many companies are grappling with.

Learn more about how HPE can help you reinvent your workplace with a safe, secure hybrid workplace that empowers collaboration across sites, campuses, home offices, and everywhere in-between.

Lin Nease
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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