A few weeks ago, LJ hosted a vibrant and well-informed twitter chat about the future of the digital workplace, which we summarised in a blog post. It occurred to us that there are a lot of people and organisations still working hard to develop a basic connected digital workplace before they even think about where this field is headed in the future, so we trawled through our archives and put together a guide to the past, present and future of the digital workplace that puts some of the twitter chat into an historical context.

Allow me to introduce our Digital Workplace Futures guide, which covers the evolution of this field in 10 key areas, and looks forward to the next ’shift’ we expect to see in each case: 

  1. Technology 
  2. Ownership
  3. Community 
  4. Design 
  5. Collaboration 
  6. Skills 
  7. Change Agents 
  8. Leadership 
  9. Org Structure 
  10. Measurement 

In summary, I think we are moving away from the time when the digital workplace was IT-owned or Comms-owned to a situation in which all key stakeholders contribute to making it work for employees, and it becomes part of the fabric of the organisation rather than a sharing platform divorced from where most work really happens. We also expect the current and next wave of tech change – real-time chat, integrations, bots and simple AI support – to have a bigger impact than any previous shift, but will also require a more sophisticated approach to development and adoption. 

I hope this is useful enough to share with people thinking about how they can develop their digital workplace into a more practical and work-focused platform, and we welcome any feedback about errors or omissions.

>> Digital Workplace Futures guide

>> More information about our work in this area