Digital Workplace Experience Strategy for Anywhere Real Estate
Digital workplace experience can lead to a more productive, engaged, and innovative workforce
Challenge
To help Anywhere Real Estate establish and mature their digital workplace experience for 85K employees and agents. There were many redundant tools in place causing confusion and inefficiencies. People were wasting time trying to figure out which tool to use for a specific tasks, causing lack of adoption for newly rolled out enterprise applications. There were additional challenges such as:
- Rollout of O365 platform with no adoption or metrics plan in place to ensure success
- Inconsistent UX and user interactions for applications causing frustration and reduced productivity
- Lack of personalization in UX designs due to inaccurate / missing backend people data
- Poor technology user experiences in the office for meetings and lack of support for hybrid work
- Inefficient workflows with manual and lack of standard processes
Solution
Formed and lead a Digital Workplace Experience organization and strategy which defines the overall User Experience of Anywhere’s digital tools and platforms (e.g, O365) that employees and agents use to perform their work. This new organization focuses on how they interact with technology in the workplace, and how that technology can be optimized to improve their productivity, collaboration, communication, and overall satisfaction with their job. This includes creating user-friendly applications, simplifying processes and removing redundant tools.
The digital workplace enables a culture that drives engagement, productivity, innovation and collaboration to achieve business outcomes. It creates an inviting and secure, people-centric experience that establishes new and effective ways of working so people can connect from anywhere, anytime, and across all devices in a hybrid work environment.
Sample Digital Workplace Strategy Elements
Defining digital workplace capabilities
Digital workplace capabilities are defined based on researching business and user needs and are comprised of the tools and technologies employees and agents need to do their jobs. Capabilities are delivered through defined roadmaps and always adhere to defined user experience principles such as aligning to business priorities, leveraging technology investments, providing critical contexts, personalized and highly relevant, etc.
Understanding user needs
To help inform prioritization of roadmap challenges and ensure good user adoption, personas are created to help define current challenges and identify future needs. Personas (as in this example for the overall digital workplace experience) can be broader to cover all similar roles but for individual projects, personas are defined at more granular people levels.
Creating the roadmap of projects to deliver capabilities
Research from defining capabilities also captures current business, technology, and people challenges which is used to help define projects through creation of roadmaps that help define priority.
Defining and measuring success
All projects in the roadmap have pre-defined success metrics defined as part of the adoption plan which are measured monthly and are shared with project teams, stakeholders, and executives. These include both qualitative and qualitative measures. Adoption plans are adjusted for underperforming measures.
Improving room collaboration and making virtual attendees feel like they have a seat at the table
Designed new A/V meeting and collaboration spaces at in support of a new remote/hybrid work environment. Use of dual displays, interactive white boards, and intelligent cameras help virtual participants feel like they have a seat at the table. Received a 4.87/5 rating for user satisfaction.
Creating self-service channels for people to learn about the new digital workplace
Various self-service channels for agents and employees have been created, such as a SharePoint site to learn about the new digital workplace and how to leverage O365 to improve their business. Project-specific sites are also organized under this parent site. Yammer is also used where people can connect, share, and discover digital workplace knowledge.