Intro
If you didn’t prepare your team for the digital workspace this year, then 2025 will probably be your last chance. Lately, we’ve been seeing companies doing just the opposite, wanting to bring the 1950s style of working to a 2025 workplace.
The latest culprit is Amazon. During the pandemic, they gave their teams the ability to work from home to keep everything running smoothly. But starting Jan 2nd, thousands of Amazon workers will have to return to the office 5 days a week after a sweeping RTO mandate issued by the CEO. Amazon is trying to put the genie back in the bottle, but that simply doesn’t work. So today, we’ll help you actually prepare for the workplace of 2025 instead of trying to reverse the irreversible.
4 Elements to Help Prepare you for the Digital Workspace.
The following four elements are a must-have if you want to successfully transition into a digital workspace and 2025 is the year to do so:
Solving Information Overload
How many times did your phone ping you while reading this article?
Too many times.
Information overload is not a new problem, but it still isn’t properly solved in the digital workspace. With every new app, social media network, workspace, and platform, our attention seems to be spread thin. It’s no wonder that our productivity falters when our attention is constantly being fought for; it’s tiresome.
So how do you solve this in your digital workspace? By having everything in a single space (single source of truth). With that, you’re not having your employees constantly transition from one app to another to find the piece of information they need.
You don’t want to provide any additional opportunities for your employees to be bombarded with additional information and irrelevant messages across multiple channels.
Keep everything tight by keeping everything on a single platform, like an intranet.
Personalization aka Less is More
Keeping everything consolidated into a single source of truth is an integral part creating a digital workspace, but sometimes internal communicators need to create a push communication campaign rather than a pull.
This is where personalization comes in. More and more digital workplaces are prioritizing quality over quantity. Curated messages over reply to all email blasts.
For example, when the head of IT is just bursting with excitement to tell everyone about the new upgraded setup they secured for the department, it’s important to decide who actually needs to hear this information. Is it relevant to HR or marketing? If not, then why overload them with notifications when segmenting your audience to only those who need to know will be far more effective.
Prioritize AI Readiness Over Implementation
The past two years have been branded by the rise of AI and 2025 will be the same. Using AI tools to enhance productivity is something that people did on their own. However, privacy, plagiarism and compliance concerns continue to be an obstacle for widespread implementation. Figuring out how exactly AI fits into your tool stack is an integral part of creating a future proof digital workspace.This includes organization wide employee training, policy creation and internal reviews.
It’s no longer enough to just have a handful of employees tinker with AI— it’s time to include AI into all pores of your digital workspace so you can benefit from it.
Cross-team collaboration
AI can help a lot, but the foundational element of your 2025 digital workspace will be cross-team collaboration. Information silos are a thing of the past and to succeed in today’s market, you need your teams to work together, sharing information, resources, ideas, and plans.
Marketing and sales, finance and legal, IT and operations, are just some of the teams that should be actively working together, sharing information on a daily basis to ensure all processes work smoothly in the company.
Again, you shouldn’t rely on these teams alone to work together— you should create processes that will make that as easy as possible. The more barriers and obstacles you remove from the way, the easier will be for cross-team collaboration and the better the results will be.
Conclusion
Preparing your digital workspace for 2025 isn’t going to be easy. Companies will have to move fast and iterate plenty of processes if they want to keep up with the latest market changes, shifts, and trends. Intranets can help fix all the problems we talked about today: information overload, measuring the right things, enhancing productivity, and cross-team collaboration.
Check out our intranet planning worksheet here for more details.
