A Map for the Digital Workspace
(Chapter 10 from Transform: A Rebel’s Guide for Digital Transformation)
Evolution of the digital workspace
Since 1997, my colleagues and I have been analyzing digital workplaces / intranets with a view to making them simpler to navigate and search. We noticed a clear evolutionary path:
- They began in classic silo fashion with an information architecture/navigation mapped directly to the organizational departmental or divisional structure. If you didn’t have a deep understanding of where everything fits within the organization chart, you couldn’t find your way around.
- They began to include navigation labels for “Tools” or “Systems”, which were in fact “intranets within intranets”. They were, in essence, stuff that the IT Department was responsible for and wanted to keep in the same place for the convenience of the IT Department.
- They quickly became places to store and archive stuff because there was nowhere else to store them. Thus, they grew and grew and grew in volume, most of it not current.
- Communications departments began to be given control and the intranet then became a sprawling online magazine of new stories, press releases and such. Often, this communication was one-way management propaganda.
As we analyzed intranets, we noticed clear patterns. The ones that failed remained stuck in an organization-centric mode of design. The ones that succeeded designed around employee tasks. Between 2012 and 2015 we did an analysis of 55 intranets in the US, Canada, UK, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. There was a mix of government and business intranets, from medium to large organizations (10,000+ employees).
In each of these 55 intranets, we had carried out task analysis whereby we identified the top and tiny tasks of employees. We compiled almost 2,500 tasks in total, yet clear patterns became evident. The following task groups began to emerge:
- About Me
- Find People / Collaboration
- About The Company
- News
- Policies & Procedures
- “Core” Tasks
About Me
“About Me” is mainly the group of tasks connected with your career. In an organization-centric world, most of these tasks would be found in the HR department. In every organization that we have ever analyzed — whether public or private — there is always such a set of tasks. In a typical Top Tasks analysis, up to 50% of the top tasks could be About Me type tasks.
In some polls, we saw two clear sub-types of “About Me” tasks. Firstly, there are “Service & Support” type tasks, which make use of an internal service. For instance, “order work clothing” or “what is available for lunch at the canteen” or “get IT support for my computer”. Secondly, there are “My Employment” tasks such as “what was I paid last month”.
We noticed a clear hierarchy in the voting for About Me Tasks:
- Training
- Pay / Salary
- Work-life balance (stress reduction, flexible working)
- Career development (performance, appraisals)
- Leadership development
- Safety, health and environment
- IT support / helpdesks
- Job vacancies
- Employee benefits
Regardless of the environment, the above 9 tasks kept being voted for in the same basic order. In essence, what we have here is a second-level navigation that you would get when you clicked on the About Me link.
About the Company
These tasks relate specifically to the organization itself:
- History, facts and figures
- What are your organization’s published strategies and plans?
- Details about its size and location and how it’s organized (although organization charts are also important in Find People & Collaboration)
Find People & Collaboration
There are two types of find people tasks:
- Find a person when you know their name. A relatively easy task to design for.
- Find an expert. This is much more challenging because often when someone is looking for an expert on the intranet they require one from a different department / silo. Very few organizations are set up to facilitate finding experts.
Collaboration is strongly linked with finding people and experts. You could possibly describe this area as the social space; the space where people go to get to know each other and to collaborate, particularly in a cross-functional manner — the way of the new model organization.
News
Employees want to know what’s happening with the organization, what changes have occurred, what new products and services are being offered. Traditionally, many organizations considered that “news” was what management decided was news. However, progressive digital workplaces are tapping into most highly rated / viewed social media posts, and other employee-driven news sources. What employees want is not happy clappy propaganda but rather “news I can use”. News that genuinely helps them in their day-to-day work.
Policies and procedures
The digital workplace answered crucial questions such as:
- What are the branding guidelines for putting together a brochure?
- What procedure should I follow in this situation?
- What’s the policy on this?
Policies and procedures are an essential part of the digital workspace, particularly for larger organizations.
Core Tasks
Every organization has a special set of tasks that go to the core of its purpose. Rolls-Royce makes engines. IKEA makes and sells furniture. The BBC makes TV and radio programs. A department of social welfare delivers welfare services. In many organizations, a typical label for such core tasks is “Products and Services.”
The core tasks are the ones where most value lies. Improving them — masking them faster and easier to find and complete — is the essence of the challenge of the enterprise designer. So, if you’re wondering where the best place to start in transforming the workspace, start with the core tasks. That will get management attention because that’s where the value and the future of the organization lies.
Designing a task-based architecture
Based on the previous analysis, here is what the top level of a task-based navigation can look like.
You will notice that news and policies and procedures are missing. We have found that it is more effective to associate the news and the policy with a specific task or task area. For example, on the BBC intranet if you get to the page for booking a taxi, the policy for booking the taxi is also there. If there is, for example, a change in the pension plan, this news should be available in the pension plan section of About Me. And if it’s important enough then it can be promoted on the overall homepage and the About Me homepage.
In many organizations, we do a Top Tasks analysis there, we have a particular task or set of tasks that are very important to that organization. In one organization we dealt with, there was a major emphasis on training, and as a result, training was the number 1 top task for employees. There is room to add these special top tasks to the navigation.
Try and keep the top level navigation with eight or less options. And, of course, you will have to name the Core Task Class. (A typical name is “Products & Services”.)
From digital workplace to digital workspace
We have been doing task identification projects for intranets for more than 10 years. In all that time, the tasks have remained pretty much the same. It’s been about finding people, training, pay and benefits, products and services. There has been one exception: flexible working. Every year, the need to work more flexibly gets an increased vote. Working from home hardly registered 10 years ago. Now, it is a top task for most employees. Running online meetings and gaining remote access to the intranet grows in demand every year. It’s no longer a digital “workplace” but rather a digital “workspace”.
The way to design for this is to design for the employee task, not the organizational structure, or the system or tool. We don’t have to get rid of the organization’s structures, systems and tools. We just have to make them invisible in the navigation. We need to gradually create a common interface that knits together all these disparate environments into an intuitive digital landscape, a workspace that transcends physical geography, organizational conventions and software types. We don’t need one system but we do need one interface. And the way we get there is by designing for and continuously improving the top tasks.
Read the previous chapter: Revolution in the Workplace
Read the next chapter: Collaborating and Connecting
