Gone are the days when the workplace was merely a physical space employees occupied during regular office hours. Today’s always-connected, instant-access environment has blurred the lines between the physical office and the place where work happens. As the distinction between professional and personal life dissolves, and the workplace becomes truly digital, employees are communicating and collaborating in unprecedented ways with the help of digital tools of the modern workplace. To enable knowledge sharing across the organization, they want the ability to forge productive business relationships beyond natural workgroups. As a result, it is increasingly clear that the traditional ‘create and push’ information approach no longer meets employees’ evolving needs.
What is a digital workplace and what are digital tools?
The digital workplace encompasses all the technologies people use to get work done in today’s workplace – both the ones in operation and the ones yet to be implemented. It ranges from your HR applications and core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools.
The workplace is changing
While the workplace began transforming as far back as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the widespread proliferation of information technology forever changed the ways in which employees connect, collaborate and communicate. This change accelerated over the last 30 years due to the emergence of three fundamental trends:
- Aging workforce: as the baby boomers continue to retire, they are taking key knowledge with them, increasing the need to capture their knowledge.
- Information overload: information is still growing at exponential rates and employees can’t find what they need, even with technology advances.
- The need for speed: with the rapid pace of today’s work environment, employees increasingly need to work faster and collaborate more effectively to get their jobs done
What can you do?
The emerging digital workplace can address these concerns by helping organizations:
- Support changes in working styles that enable employees to work more transparently and better leverage social networks.
- Unify offline and online communications by keeping employees connected through their mobile devices to provide anywhere, anytime access to digital tools and corporate information.
- Focus on employee experience by providing them with user experience they have outside the firewall. Provide choice, flexibility and personalization.
- Support virtual work environments that allow employees to stay connected in distributed and virtualized work locations while balancing customer privacy and operational risk.
- Minimize spending and enhance productivity by providing employees with the right digital tools and right information at the right time.
- Win the war on talent by offering the progressive and innovative environments that top candidates now expect.
Digital tools for the manufacturing space
New digital tools will enable people who need information access to perform their jobs better and safer in every part of the manufacturing company — including the shop floor or the production line. This will bring a new era of communication and collaboration to any organization.
One of such digital tools is REWO. REWO is a plug & play end-to-end video SOP platform that transfers knowledge up to 12x faster than traditional documentation methods. REWO drastically improves capturing, visualizing, and communicating knowledge to anyone within the company’s ecosystem. If you’re interested in improving the digital state of your manufacturing process, click here to book a demo, so you can see exactly how REWO can help.