Empower Your Workforce by Optimizing Your Digital Workplace

Harvard Business Review

5 days ago

Through the widespread adoption of digital devices, almost every enterprise today is a digital workplace. That makes it critical for every organization to consider the digital employee experience (DEX) it gives its workforce.
Forward-thinking business leaders recognize they can drive innovation and productivity by empowering their workforce with an optimal DEX: a digital infrastructure that operates as seamlessly and intuitively for employees as the technology they rely on in their personal lives.
But just as every organization has unique motives for optimizing the digital workplace, every organization also faces unique challenges that can impede its digital ambitions.
In a recent report by TeamViewer and Bloomberg Media, business leaders said their most pressing needs for transforming their business through a digital workplace strategy include increasing revenue and productivity.
Barriers to the Digital Workplace
Even with strong ambitions to boost revenue and productivity through digital transformation, many organizations face persistent barriers. Legacy infrastructure, siloed systems, and fragmented tools often stand in the way of real progress.
Survey respondents noted that their efforts to modernize are frequently slowed by the complexity of integrating new technologies into outdated environments.
When organizations trap their teams in silos, they may inadvertently pay unnecessary expenses due to tool and license fragmentation. This can disrupt productivity, potentially increasing software and machinery downtime, workforce friction, and vulnerability to cyberthreats. And when a digital workplace isn't working, its people—and its business growth—may be suffering.
Benefits of Enhancing DEX
To optimize the digital workplace in a way that both enhances DEX and grows revenue, organizations need to equip their infrastructure with easy-to-use technology that simplifies organizational complexity and builds efficiency, allowing them to manage their growing device and machinery fleets and scale their business securely.
An effective digital workplace platform must be sufficiently robust to handle organizational complexity. It must be easy and intuitive for IT teams to use so they can monitor workplace devices, detect anomalies, and remediate issues in advance. And if issues arise that hurt productivity, the IT team can connect remotely on demand to troubleshoot.
In a range of sectors as diverse as retail, insurance, and food manufacturing, businesses that optimize their digital workplace can boost their productivity, eliminating silos that trap insights and improving processes and workflows that give their employees a better DEX.
Better Troubleshooting, Less Downtime
Employees at one organization, RLI Insurance, had struggled with efficiency on several fronts. But the company found several solutions by investing in a DEX solution.
• Limited endpoint visibility inhibited RLI's staff from getting accurate experience scores, and inefficient reporting operations made its workforce reluctant to report IT issues. RLI improved productivity by introducing TeamViewer DEX, which now helps track stability, responsiveness, performance, and sentiment. Employees can more easily report issues and the IT team can take greater initiative to solve them.
• Overheating devices drained batteries and disrupted productivity. After introducing better troubleshooting tools and processes, the IT team can better monitor devices' heat and battery lives, identifying problematic hardware more quickly and eliminating this source of friction.
• Monitoring and validating Microsoft patches to improve system security and scores cost RLI's IT team valuable time and attention. Adopting tools to help it more effectively observe data for its entire fleet, the team can now better understand and prioritize patches, efficiently identifying areas that require its attention and minimizing workforce disruption.
Unifying Remote Operations
Another example of a smart digital workplace investment is Buehler, a key solution partner for the food and mobility industries that depends on remote operations with a range of geographical challenges. More than 1,000 technicians use remote support software to maintain and commission plants for Buehler's customers.
Until recently, the company's customers found its former support software almost impossible to use without specialized IT knowledge. And support sessions with rural areas frequently broke down due to poor internet infrastructure.
Buehler implemented a new, enterprise-grade remote connectivity solution called TeamViewer Tensor for its digital service processes. The solution eliminated these barriers and closed geographical distance, because it is easy to use and works in areas with low internet bandwidth.
On top of that, the company introduced TeamViewer's augmented reality (AR)-powered software Frontline for real-time video calls, enabling remote expert assistance in case of hardware issues. This way, Buehler could share technical knowledge among employees remotely while reducing its experts' travel, saving time and costs.
With faster and more reliable IT troubleshooting, customers experience less infrastructure downtime. AR-supported frontline solutions both boost efficiency and enable technicians to log and trace support sessions—capabilities they need for compliance with the global cybersecurity standards that protect Buehler's employees and customers.
Every organization faces a unique set of challenges for enhancing the digital workplace. But with the right digital workplace solutions in place, these businesses can boost productivity, break down silos, and enable, improve, and automate processes and workflows to give employees—and customers—a better digital experience