Creating Your Digital Workspace Roadmap

A modern intranet, or ‘digital workspace’, can breathe life into internal comms. But progressing from the initial planning stages to rolling it out to employees is a significant journey. Here, we offer a practical, step-by-step roadmap for a successful digital workspace launch.

Step one: Choose a digital workspace provider

Questions to ask: What kind of intranet do we want? Do we want to build or buy? What IT resources do we have available? Can we provide ongoing support? How important is customisation? What is the budget? What are the timeframes?

First up, it’s the big question: build or buy? Or is there a better way?

  • Build from scratch – When you opt to ‘build’, you can customise your digital workspace to meet your business’s requirements. Unfortunately, custom development is expensive, time-consuming and involves specialist skills
  • Buy ‘out of the box’ – Buying a pre-made solution is cheaper and quicker than building from scratch. However, there’s little to no customisation and limited control over the apps, functionality and design features included
  • Fresh – There’s a third and better option: a ready-made solution that is highly customisable. Fresh provides the best of both worlds – it has the quick delivery of ‘out of the box’, while offering the flexibility of building from scratch

Step two: Get deployment right

Questions to ask: Why do our employees use the intranet? How does it add value to their working lives? How will it improve internal comms? What kind of user experience do we want? What apps and functionality do we need to include?
Now it’s time to think about requirements. Here are three areas to consider:

  • Mobile – To reach your employees, your digital workspace needs to be mobile. They want to be able to check company news and updates on the go
  • Social – Employees should be able to engage with all communications, through liking, sharing, and commenting on posts
  • User-generated – Another important aspect is user-generated content. Let colleagues populate the intranet with useful content that adds value.

Step three: Make sure adoption succeeds

There’s no point spending time and money on a new platform, only to see it ignored by colleagues – or not used to its full capacity. Although adoption is a long-term concern and there’s no quick fix, there are many ways to encourage greater enthusiasm for your new modern workspace.

Adoption checklist:

  • Assign champions to promote the platform
  • Provide training to encourage best practice
  • Embrace and encourage social networking
  • Encourage people to log in every day
  • Make sure content is user-driven
  • Offer incentives to spark life into the platform
  • Lead from the top
  • Monitor and report on usage
  • Encourage feedback from users

A Fresh approach is the best approach

Fresh is a modern digital workspace, built on Office 365 and rich with intelligent features. Fresh will ensure colleagues are fully engaged with company news, announcements and discussion. Not only is Fresh capable of transforming how your teams connect, communicate and collaborate, but it has been designed for rapid delivery, maximum impact and instant ROI.

If you’d like us to help you kickstart your digital workplace strategy, you can sign up to a personal workshop to identify your organisation’s current state and plan the path you’ll take to deploy a successful intranet.

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