What Makes Digital Engagement A Necessity For The Post-COVID Workplaces
COVID-19 pandemic led to the reverse migration of employees from cities to hometowns. With expansion of remote work, it became necessary for workplaces to provide employees with certain tools that can help them work efficiently.
In this scenario, digital engagement tools played a key role in helping colleagues onboard smoothly and connect with each other. Digital engagement here refers to an environment where employees interact, engage and work in a digital culture using available technologies. The technologies and tools help in the delivery of great digital experiences by enhancing the productivity of employees and making them proficient in the activities they perform.
Digital engagement is an integral part of the overall employee experience cycle, especially with the adaptation of remote and hybrid work cultures. The interface of technology includes workflow, communication, productivity, collaborations, learnings, and HR Systems. The outcome of digital engagement is enhanced exposure to new techniques and practices and thus, more efficient workspaces.
Importance of digital engagement post-COVID-19
A collaborative environment is a need of today’s working world. Employees’ preferences are shifting towards more flexible, inclusive, and high-energy workspaces where everyone gets the chance to present their thought and to cultivate higher processes in their working efficiency by getting reviewed and collaborations. Digital engagement proves to be time and cost-effective by connecting employees virtually. Hence, digital engagement is going to be even more relevant in the post-pandemic business environment, as automation serves the motive of connecting, bringing employees together and easing their way of working.
When tech giants such as Microsoft, Google launched their digital engagement platforms Microsoft teams, Google meet, the users found them very convenient and the majority of organisations started using them. The user interfaces provided by these tech giants have helped employees understand how to access digital setups easily and organizations are able to work efficiently with the teams on virtual platforms and can operate the teams effectively.
How digital engagement can enhance employee experiences
Employees’ experiences depend on the way their organisation helps them in adopting new techniques and building new values. Few of the practices can always be followed to keep employees engaged virtually, inspire them to collaborate, share and interact. One such practice is gamification.
Gamification can be proved as a best practice to encourage employees to be comfortable with the digital era. Gamified learning environment boosts chances of employees to learn more and get involved more within the organization. Employee experience in an organization can overall be improved by involving them into digital practices.
While it is not possible for all the employees to embrace the change of fitting themselves into the new culture, certain practices can be applied to adapt the new systems. Instilling a mindset that digitalization facilitates greater productivity, fulfillment, enhancement, and collaboration. Sending
out communications through the leaders about the launch of the programmes can influence the employees to cultivate the idea of digitization.
Cloud-based services such as Workplace from Facebook are an example of best digital employee engagement practices where anybody inside organization can find the ways to connect, develop and grow on to professional as well as personal levels. Applications such as Workplace by Facebook have introduced the digital workspace to the employees where they are entitled to access what is happening in their organization with fun.
Personalised content making on such platforms is a very innovative way of reaching colleagues and connecting with them by sharing snapshots of ongoing operations, giving recognition within the organization to each other. Engagement platforms help in cater to a larger audience than delivering anything offline.
Lastly, digital set up has also given us the power to launch anything worldwide and show it to the world virtually, few initiatives can be followed to give recognition to the employees and make their efforts count. Initially rewards and recognition events were conducted at offline places and employees had to make extra efforts to attend the events. Since most of the events can take place virtually now, R&R can also fall under the same category, making employees more engaged and connected on the screens, giving them comfortable to attend the programs from wherever they want to. Digital transformations like this can be proved as cost-effective as well as more collaborative within the organisation.
(The authored piece has been penned down solely for BW People publication by Kaushik Chakraborty, Director, Human Resources, Savills India)
