The Digital Workplace

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, many employees and businesses alike have had to realign their internal and external business structure to coincide with the global health and safety rules.

It's brought in a new era of almost all office employees, worldwide, swapping their physical office environment for remote working solutions in order to stay safe over the past year.

As a large employer in the UK, Ireland and in the USA, our business is no different. Finding solutions to large scale problems is not just a company strapline; we are also finding how best to digitally connect our employees from around the globe during coronavirus and beyond.

The solution? Updating the company’s digital workplace for the global office team, in order to better support them as hybrid global working continues.

WHAT IS THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE?

The digital workplace is a phrase extended to any digitalised system, process or platform that relates to your employment.

It is essentially the modern, digital equivalent to systems in the physical workplace. It could equate to an IT ticket system, for example, or a video calling platform , or even an instant messaging service.

THE CHALLENGE

With that in mind, you can understand how the ‘digital workplace’ quickly becomes a fragmented web of multiple systems, with businesses having many different digital platforms being used for different reasons. In some cases, this can work well, but in others the employees are left wading through a lot of different platforms and processes to find files, send a communication or even to ask for help.

Perhaps you have experienced this yourself? For instance, people calling you on one digital workplace system, but you’ll be receiving instant messages from the same person on a another piece of software, whilst leaving other communications such as emails, on a different platform, unanswered.

It can quite quickly become a dizzying and frustrating digital work environment for any employee, particularly when it is so heavily relied upon during the current COVID-19 crisis.

THE AIM FOR ANORD MARDIX

Anord Mardix has therefore made the unanimous decision to find a dynamic, digital solution that incorporates a key business requirement of amplified communication and departmental transparency between employees across our global teams.

Enter Powell 365 Intranet and Doherty Associates.

Scott Findlater, CIO at Anord Mardix, commented on the exciting implementation for the business,

With the addition of Powell 365 Intranet, a dynamic digital workplace tool, existing systems within our business will work unanimously to enhance employee communications, through its easy-to-use intranet interface.

It will ensure that all internal employee communications will be more streamlined and efficient than ever before.

HOW THE INTRANET WILL BENEFIT US

Moving away from a fragmented digital workplace system and into a collaborative one will have many distinct benefits for the team, as noted by the Head of HR for EMEA, Danielle Walker, who states:

“Here at Anord Mardix we know how important it is to keep all members of staff happy, wherever they work. Our company ultimately needs to adapt to the demands of the global environment, and that means adapting to the new digital demands that the global pandemic is putting on our staff. The digital workplace will enable staff to stay connected and working efficiently which, in turn, will make everyone much happier at work, even after the pressure of the pandemic has eased.”

These changes will also have significant benefits for the business as a whole:

• Driving corporate and leadership communications, to become one message delivered stronger.
• Having a portal to continually improve our group culture, values and knowledge, globally.
• Actively inform employees on information about our team, our industry and other key updates.
• Reduce nonessential communications, reduce meeting fatigue, whilst making the meetings that do occur more productive and engaging.
• Increasing departmental transparency and facilitating professional relationships between departments and global teams.
• Act as a central repository for core business function resources.

Ultimately this business change at Anord Mardix will provide a much more inclusive and engaging Digital Workplace experience in the era of hybrid working – i.e., working from home as well as in the office - and ensuring we deliver the right content, to the right employee, in the right format, at the right time.