Following the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses across the globe proved that maintaining an efficient and productive environment is possible when working in a digital workplace. Even now that most countries are reducing restrictions, many companies and their staff have chosen to continue working remotely or introduce hybrid working models. There are a few things, however, to keep in mind for creating and maintaining a productive digital workplace.

Keep up to date with the latest technological developments

When creating a digital workplace, you want to make sure that you’re not only using the latest technology, but the infrastructure that you use is future-proof too. For instance, you may want to decide early on between virtualization and cloud computing as well as their different types.

Review your team’s attributes

Migrating to a virtual workplace involves a lot of planning and skills to implement. It’s important to have an IT department that is prepared and able to take on such a large project. If any of your employees have previous experience with digital workspaces, they may play an important part in project management.

You also need to consider the overall digital literacy of your team. Will they be able to adapt to the changes quickly, or are they going to require some digital workplace training? If training is needed, you may want to draw up an implementation schedule with that in mind.

Adapting your company culture

Your company culture is one of the most important factors in your business, acting like a glue holding your team together. Realistically, it’s unlikely that your current company culture is going to perfectly transfer to this radically different working environment. If it’s a highly social company culture with lots of in-house team activities, then you have to assess whether this will flourish in a virtual environment. You will either need to work on creating virtual versions of your current culture’s activities or plan to create a new company culture.

Collaborative tools

It’s important to transfer the in-office communication to the virtual workplace in a seamless way. Your team should feel as though they can collaborate without friction and delay. Your employees can communicate using video calls, chats, or digital team rooms. However, you may find more productive and automated ways to manage large projects, assign tasks and monitor the status of their implementation.

Customer-facing technology

Going digital must not lead to declining customer experience. When moving your workplace to a virtual environment, you need to ensure that customer interaction is just as smooth and easy as within your team. You may want to assess the merits of using chatbots and their possible limitations. This may be a chance, however, to improve the automation within your company. The demographic of your customers is important here – consider whether they are digitally literate and will be able to adapt to these changes easily.

All in all, there are many factors to juggle when deciding to move to a digital workplace. It is important to assess the overall costs of the project and use different metrics to gauge the way your overall business productivity and operations are impacted throughout the migration.