How the digital workplace is changing working life
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This document discusses workplace mobility at BigCorp. It notes that 87,000 employees work across 1,700 branches in 70 countries. It introduces iMeeting, a mobile app that allows for quick access to meeting documents and improves communication and decision making. Testimonials from employees highlight how mobility allows them to start work early to catch different time zones and have more open conversations from their home office compared to an open office environment. Mobility through tools like iMeeting and a flexible work environment are said to increase collaboration at BigCorp.
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How the digital workplace is changing working life
- 1. WORK It’s what I do, not where I go
- 3. Mobility
- 4. M0 M1 M2 Welcome to M3 BigCorp Mobile -News -Emergency phone numbers
- 5. M4
- 7. Information Communication Online Services Systems
- 9. iMeeting • Quick access to key meeting documents • Speed up decision making • Reduce email • Record-keeping • Outlook integration • Mobile and tablet apps
- 10. Go Agile
- 11. Place People Tech Policy
- 12. People
- 14. Use of space
- 16. Tech
- 17. “I am able to start work early, catching those countries that I am “My interaction and regionally responsible for collaboration with my where there is a time team has increased, as I difference. At the end of am more able to have the day I am able to juggle open and honest my work demands and conversations in my hours so that I catch the home office US late in the evening if environment, than I am in necessary, because I’m the open office not just sat on a train.” environment.” Adopting agility has increased personal interaction, and whilst not easy to measure, has benefits with professional interaction
- 18. Broadcast Online services Collaboration Flexibility Mobility
- 19. QUESTIONS? We’ve got a few minutes
- 20. @sharonodea sharon.odea@sc.com
Editor's Notes
- 1 minuteHello. I’m Sharon O’Dea, and I’m Senior Manager, Online Communications at Standard Chartered Bank, which is a global banking group headquartered in the UK, and today I’m going to talk about work, and specifically how intranets increasingly mean work is about the activity you do, not the place you go to do it. Offices used to be like this. Maybe yours still is!But the nature of work is slowly but steadily changing. Traditional corporate tools, such as intranets, HR and finance systems, are being joined by new collaboration and social tools. These are bringing new capabilities and opportunities into organisations, allowing staff to connect and coordinate more effectively.Consumer technology is also evolving rapidly, transforming almost every aspect of daily life. It is now common for people’s personal tools, such as mobile phones and tablets, to be better than the ones they use at work.This is putting pressure on organisations to catch up with consumer technologies, and to enable more flexible ways of working.Alongside these technology changes, demographic changes are slowly having an effect. Teleworking and flexible hours are becoming increasingly common, as is a blurring between work and home time. Employees at their desks from 9-5, like this guy here, are becoming less common.All of this is captured by the concept of the ‘digital workplace’, which encompasses the broader electronic working environment for staff, outlining how the pieces all fit together.For many, this is an exciting time, ushering in a new generation of corporate tools and behaviours, for the benefit of both organisations and staff.In my short presentation today I’m going to talk about the digital workplace is transforming working lives in many organisations, including my own.
- Staff in all organisations need easy access to the tools and information they require for their jobs. They must keep up to date with the changes that impact their job. Most of all, they need to work with other staff, whether as part of a closely knit team, or via loose connections across the organisations.Historically, most of these needs were met by the corporate intranet, and this remains as the single point of entry for corporate systems and content. But the way in which they can – or want to – access that information will vary depending on how people work.Major changes are unfolding in organisations, however, that are reshaping how staff work. These include:Staff who are increasingly away from their desks, but still need to be connected and productive.Shifts away from command-and-control business models, to more flexible and collaborative ways of working.Increasing competitive pressures that demand streamlined and simplified business processes.Greater requirements for knowledge and information sharing across organisational silos.As a result of these changes, the intranet becomes just one digital tool used by staff. In this expanded ‘digital workplace’, staff use multiple access points, including via mobiles, tablets and desktop applications.Social and collaborative tools also form part of the mix, as do seamlessly integrated business tools and systems.The result is a productive business environment that takes full advantages of new technologies and working practices.
- 1 minuteThis is me, working flexibly.At an airport, looking kinda tiredAt a conferenceAt homeIn bed, asleepThe point here is that if the digital workplace is really to change the way we work, it can’t just be about making services or the intranet accessible from outside the office, but designing services that are mobile, for people who are mobile, so they can access them while they are on the move.The mobile web has been with us for a while now. The iPhone’s been around since 2009, and now over half of us have a smartphone. We’ve become used to accessing the web on our phones, either though the browser or though apps.What we need when we are out – at an airport, or a conference, or in bed – is generally pretty different to what we want to do when we’re in the office.Yet enterprise technology has been slow to react, and it’s only really over the course of the last year that businesses have started to focus much attention on mobility, and begin the journey toward a digital workplace that really supports mobile and flexible working.I call that journey the Mobility Roadmap. Let’s take a look at the steps on that roadmap.
- 3 minutesM0 (yes, because I am a geek I am counting from zero)Your intranet exists only within the walls of your company office(s) and cannot escape the ~1024×1024 confides of your employee’s monitors. If we’re honest, you don’t have a mobile intranet at all do you?M1The firewall is breached. Employees can view an intranet outside the office, but likely only after entering an abstract combination of ancient glyphs read in the reflection of a silver spoon on a night with a full moon.They might even try accessing from something other than a PC – but that thought makes your IT manager shiver, and at best it’s an afterthought. If they do, they probably get an illegible mess or a text only ‘WAP‘ page.M2You have a site – or maybe just a page – that ‘works’ on mobile. its probably built by ‘that clever geeky bloke who works on floor two’ who put the site together over a weekend.It’s separate from the intranet — so technically, you now have two intranets to manage — but it takes some intranet content (the people directory if you’re lucky, but more likely the news), and displays it on a screen that fits onto an iPhone. All the buttons are all a bit bigger so they can be clicked with a fingertip.Some of your senior team probably think that this is the greatest thing ever to be created. Your IT manager probably doesn’t like the sound of it one bit and is busily trying to hide it and avoid the support calls.M3 Your intranet has grown an extra face. Now there’s a ‘mobile optimized’ stylesheet or template in the CMS that makes pages play nice on mobile devices.Screens squidge or linierize. Buttons and links are fingertip sized. Text is a bit bigger and images a little bit smaller.It’s possible you had a ‘WAP‘ or text only version of this before, but that was never used and didn’t really work. This is really rather different, because it does. Importantly, you only have one intranet, viewable in two different ways.The intranet you access through a mobile is optimised for people who are mobile. People on the move need things like contact details and office locations more than people at desks. While your main intranet homepage might not carry this kind of information your mobile intranet homepage probably does.While the mobile intranet doesn’t ‘do’ anything that a desktop intranet couldn’t, the content has been rearranged and re-prioritised to suit mobile working better.
- 1 minuteM4. Mobility – not just ‘a mobile intranet’ is the priority. You might design for mobile first and retro-fit to desktop, but importantly you design for people who are mobile, thinking about the different tasks that they might want to do and when, how and with what device they might do that. Building for mobile first means the content makes full use of the features available on a mobile device such as geolocation, camera, and offline functionality. The intranet becomes much more context aware and this allows content creators to be much better at getting ‘the right message to the right people at the right time’.
- 1 minuteMy organisation, Standard Chartered, is on that same journey, so today I’m going to tell you about where we were, where we are now, and how that’s going for us.So to set the scene, let me tell you a bit about us. Bear with me – this isn’t a sales pitch, honest.You may never have heard of us, but Standard Chartered is one of the UK’s largest financial services companies. We work in 70 countries and employ 87,000 people. Our business is mostly focussed in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, where we work across consumer and wholesale banking.(But you’ve most likely heard of us because we sponsor Liverpool Football Club).We’re a global organisation, and highly mobile, with staff regularly travelling between and working with our different markets.
- 1.5 minsLike many global organisations, over the years we’ve responded to the challenge of supporting a global workforce by moving our services online. Information is the obvious one: we needed to make sure people had the information they needed to do their job, when they need it. That’s quite a challenge, and we’ve had to invest heavily in ensuring everyone from the customer service people in our call centres to our c-level execs can find and access the information they need to make decisions. With such a large, diverse and dispersed workforce, moving communications online was something of a no-brainer. Our Sharepoint intranet, iConnect, provides channels for global internal communications, as well as messaging from local communications teams – by country, business unit, community of interest, and so on. Putting services like HR and IT support online provides much-needed services to our staff in each of our thousands of branches and offices. It means people can access vital services from every office in a consistent way – book training and travel, claim expenses, purchase software, get IT queries resolved, order equipment.As well as that, it provides significant cost savings by centralising functions, reducing the need for support staff to be based in each of our country offices.Finally, it provides access to the wide variety of systems and tools that people need to use to do their jobs, so that any user can log on from any workstation and get on with their day’s work. With all four areas online, the digital workplace is simply our way of working – online is the essential place for all or most of what people need to do their jobs.
- 1 minuteBut the digital workplace can’t just help people with their individual tasks, it needs to support people to do their jobs, and for most people that means supporting people working in teams, and across functions, to achieve things together.To do this, our intranet had to become more mature. We introduced TeamSites to support intra- and inter-team working, allowing people to share documents and work in project teams across functions and countries. After a successful launch, we allowed people to set up their own team sites, introducing a automated request form to do this. We now have 14,000 sites.But everyone knows Team Sites aren’t the magic bullet for collaboration. They’re one of a range of communications tools that enable people to connect – we also have unified communications tools such as instant messaging. And also good old email!Document sharing does not equal collaboration, though. As I’m sure many of you know. **These were from our survey at the end of 2010/start 2011 – there was a marked change in the 2011 survey, numbers wise, but the point was the same. Staff are MORE than ready – appetite is super high. 75% say discussion forums and 69% believe social and professional networks offer plenty or huge value as a way of improving communication and collaboration.49% say discussion forums and 42% believe social and professional networks are currently easily available or used regularly by them.Levels of readiness in the bank are higher than both the overall and Financial Services benchmark.Around 12% of respondents are already citizens in terms of readiness for both discussion forums and social and professional networks. There are a high proportion of investigators and adventurers for both discussion forums and social and professional networks which means appetite for these kinds of technology is high.Up to 30% can be described as outsiders.
- 1 minute The bank recognised that meeting others in order to make decisions was one of the key tasks which almost every employee, whatever their role, did regularly. Some of these meetings are face-to-face, but as a global organisation we also need to work as teams across countries and timezones, through teleconferencing. But when you’re not all in the same room, it’s even more important that people have the right documents and information they need to make decisions.So they introduced iMeeting, an online meeting tool. Developed in-house, it allows you to hold all your meeting details, agenda, minutes, action items, attendee information and discussions in one place which you can access quicklyIt aims to help people make decisions faster – meaning they spend less time in meetings. By doing all the meeting planning up-front, you cut time on the time needed to agree it at the meeting itself. iMeeting creates a home for the pre-meeting conversations too, reducing the volume of emails needed to plan for a meeting. It allows you to keep track of your agenda and actions items to ensure projects and meetings run on time. No matter how many updates there are you’ll see the latest information online without the need to scroll through endless emails.Similarly, with everything online, it provides an easy record you can refer back to and see when a decision was made, for example.As with any tool of this sort, they’ve more likely to be adopted if people can find them and easily integrate them into their existing ways of working, so the team developed outlook integration, so people can access meeting information from their calendar and email. They also developed apps for iPhone and iPad so people can access agendas and suchlike when they’re on the move.We now have over 5,000 active meeting workspaces.
- 1 minuteAnd that’s all well and good, but we realised we could do more. If our information and services are online, then they don’t need to be accessed from an office. And that better meets the needs of people who are highly mobile, and flexible, like ours are.And so the bank developed and launched a programme called Agile Working. Agile Working is a collaborative physical and online work environment with flexibility, productivity and mobility at its core, delivering cost efficiencies and using space innovatively as the Bank grows.
- 1 minYeah, so what IS it?Agile working is our term for what Jane McConnell describes as “place-independent working” – taking your intranet to where people are so they can do their jobs more effectively. Neil Morgan [note: in audience] summed this up for me neatly when he said “work is what I do, not where I go”.Any successful digital workplace rollout is only partly about technology, and in fact we didn’t introduce many new tools beyond what I’ve already described. Many organisations already have the technology and tools in place for successful flexible working – the difficult thing is using them, and using them well.And that means looking at Place – the physical spaces we work inPeople – understanding users and how they work, or want to work.Policy – ensuring the organisation has the right policies, procedures and structures in place to support employees and their managers to work more flexibly
- 1 minute A central aim of the digital workplace is enhancing performance through increased collaborative working, learning and socialising. Helping people to work more effectively together without relying on physical co-location.Top performing companies are shown to work more in these ways than compared to their average performing peers (stats)One of our aims was to build trust and a high performance culture. That means thinking about the way you measure and reward performance, thinking about outcomes rather than clockwatching.
- 1 minThe youth of today. They wear tight jeans. They drank flat white, before you did. They like bands you’ve never heard of.But we need these people. We want to attract and retain the best graduates to come and work for us. We aim to be an employer of choice, attracting the best graduates from top universities to our training programmes.These people – with their funny haircuts – have grown up this way. They’re used to communicating via instant message. They think a phone is primarily a web-surfing device. They do their work in coffee shops and bars. They have never bought a magazine. Historically, younger generations have always stirred new ideas into the corporate world causing some expected irritation for older generations. Yet this time it’s not an attitude problem, it’s a transition in business where globalisation and technology have radically changed the game. Gen Y has grown up participating in this revolution and sees clearly how they can be creative and innovative in today’s world. So when they arrive in the workplace to be given a desk and told they work between 9 and 5, they don’t get it.This is especially important to us: while we’re a staid old British bank, culturally we’re quite different to that – already over half of our staff are generation Y (that’s under 30), so in order to look like the kind of modern employer normal people would want to come and work for, we want to offer modern ways of working that get the best out of people.Agile working allows quick integration of new joiners, helping us to get people up to speed more quickly. With people moving around more, there’s closer contact between senior and junior employees, helping people to learn from one another. At the same time, we increase engagement making people more likely to join, and less likely to leave.It’s not just about the cool kids with asymmetric haircuts, either. Not everyone is motivated solely by money – not even in banking – and Agile Working means we can offer a better work-life balance than many of our competitors. That, in turn, helps us to attract the talent we need.
- 1 minuteNext, places. Empty desks don’t indicate a lack of activity, but they do indicate an inefficient use of expensive floor space.In an average office, 40 per cent of desks are typically empty at any point in time. Agile gives us increased efficiency of space through desk-sharing.This helps to help offset rising rents and utility costs, and reduces our carbon footprint.But it’s not just about LESS space, but giving people the RIGHT space. Our Agile Working enabled buildings are to have a configuration of 60% desk space and 40% collaborative workspace.Collaborative zones comprise of facilities such as meeting, casual meeting, break out, quiet rooms, telephone booths and touchdown areasThe idea behind all of this is that we have space for what you do, not who you are.
- 1 minuteThe programme aims to make the most of new space and technology to give employees freedom to work where, when and how they want to, not simply when they are in. A more diverse selection of work settings, including - desk sharing, informal meeting spaces, quiet rooms, depending what you need to do the task at hand.This is our office in Changi, Singapore, which was our first to pilot Agile working.This flexibility has benefits both for the individual – being able to choose where to work – but also for the organisation. Makes us more responsive to organisational change, for instance allowing us to manage unpredictable headcount without adding cost and complexity, or to scale up teams and projects more easily.
- 2 minutesLike I said before, technology and online is only one piece of the puzzle, but it is an important one, and this is a web conference, so here goes. How did we make it happen?Standardised desktop setupIf people are going to touch down anywhere, they want to know their laptop will work. Our IT infrastructure guys invested time, love and money in making sure wherever you are you’ll get the same standardised setup featuring a mouse, keyboard and adjustable screen.Communication toolsUsing VOIP calling I can answer my phone on the same number whether I’m in the office, at home, or in a hotel. This is my work phone, on my PC desktop. Alongside this we have instant messenger, video conferencing and screen-sharing tools, so we can share and collaborate with colleagues in a variety of ways to suit the type of work we’re doing, including the iMeeting tool I talked about before.Online information and communicationOurSharepoint-based intranet for content, teamsites and people finding.ServicesTransactional services from IT and HR, available via your browser.MobileRecognising that many of our employees are highly mobile, our app development team have produced a range of apps for specific user needs. The major advantage of this is that it uses the phone’s features and improves usability. And of course it’s made rather easier as we have a single corporate phone – the iPhone.
- 1 minuteHere’s some of the feedback from the pilot. Posed by models.Experience across the sector shows a range of tangible benefitsThe employee experience can increase up to 68% by implementing a flexible workplaceReal Estate costs decrease by approximately 20% The average cost per employee can decrease by $5,000 Productivity of employees increases between 20-30% when measured on a pre and post survey basis The changing nature of work and multi-generational workplace requires flexibility The greenhouse gas emissions from companies adopting a flexible work place model decreases We’re alreadyrealising substantial financial savings from our agile programme, which is still being rolled out.
- 1 minuteSo to summarise briefly, this is a typical journey towards truly place-independent working.Starting with online communications – a traditional one-way intranet, then a two-way oneThen bringing your services online to achieve consistency, quality, speed and cost savingsOpening up access to these so they can be accessed outside the confines of your officeIn order to help people work effectively outside of the office, you need tools to help people collaborate on projects and tasks. But it’s not just about tools, but policy, support and structure to enable effective management and decision-makingAnd finally, mobility – designing sites, services and tools, not for a mobile phone, but for people who are mobile.
- Thanks, questions, etc.5 mins
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