Workplace Digital Transformation: How HR Professionals Can Juggle the Many Tools Available to Them

Today’s organizations are embracing digital tools and applications more than ever, and at the same time workers can be overwhelmed with the breadth of options to execute the day-to-day requirements associated with their roles. Jumping from one platform where collaboration is taking place to another where knowledge assets are hosted, does not make for an optimal experience that enhances productivity.

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So, how can employees quickly find answers to questions they have, without jumping from one system to another silo? How do companies easily share knowledge and information across departments?

Organizations need to look at how to explore tools that integrate across third-party applications and knowledge repositories (SharePoint, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Quickbooks, etc.) to create efficiencies and maximize productivity. This is critical in providing a cohesive, optimized employee experience, where they will no longer need to juggle multiple screens throughout the day to do their work. Putting knowledge at your employees’ fingertips and customizing the experience in their workflow, will allow for better collaboration and a more seamless experience.

One way to approach this is to look for vendors that will provide you with successful outcomes rather than extra features that employees won’t need. Platforms today need to assemble data and resources. A better platform learns as it goes so that later queries include the experiences of all previous users. This canonization of data enables other parts of a larger company to learn from the experiences of others and from other locations in the firm.

Here are five ways businesses can harness all the tools available to them while still keeping employees in their everyday workflow:

1. Access—Provide your employees convenient access to information regardless of where that information resides. Often, information resides across different silos within an organization—look for ways to provide a centralized view of knowledge and information.
2. Real-Time Collaboration—Empower your organization with easy means to collaborate using chat, voice, and video collaboration tools. Additionally, ensure that your teams can quickly query and search these conversation threads for reference later on.
3. Connect and Network Peers—Create an environment that makes it easy to connect with colleagues based on interests or areas of expertise. Your employees are your biggest source of intellectual capital, so unlock that value and empower your employees to share knowledge and to “solutioneer” together.
4. Capture Informal Knowledge—Much of the knowledge created by organizations is informal by nature. Businesses need to capture that knowledge through tools that index and make that information searchable.
5. Bring It All Together—Most organizations have tools or services to do some or all of the above, but often they are siloed experiences that create friction within their daily workflows. Look for ways to consolidate some or all of the above experiences to maximize productivity and enhance value.

It is often overlooked that HR professionals need to be able to easily use the many different programs they access in a normal day, without leaving and disrupting their workflow. This makes for a smarter workforce and allows for knowledge assembly that aggregates content and information with a single goal in mind—improving job productivity.

Iain Scholnick is the Founder & CEO of Braidio.