What is a Digital HQ?
You’re not temporarily occupying your digital headquarters — it’s your forever home.
By Ahad Hosseini and Blake Harper
Whether or not you know it, if you’re a knowledge firm, your headquarters is now online.
Even if you still have a physical headquarters with above-average daily occupancy or hope to ramp up your occupancy over in the next few months, the odds are that there has been an irreversible shift in where and how your people work.
The odds are that most of their work — connecting, collaborating, onboarding, networking, brainstorming, and planning — is now primarily happening online. Knowledge work now runs primarily through shared channels, groups, chats, docs, sheets, decks, meeting rooms, recordings, wikis, planning tools, CRMs, and good old-fashioned emails.
This hum of online activity across tools and tasks makes up your organization’s digital headquarters (HQ).
Just like the design of a physical HQ, the design of your digital HQ can dramatically affect an employee’s experience and ultimately impact the bottom line. A recent study found that the average knowledge worker spends almost two hours every day searching for and gathering information to do their jobs. In other words, for every five employees, one spends their entire week searching for information that already exists inside their organization.
This is a common experience when digital HQs are built like patchwork. Underperforming digital HQs are typically made up of tools and workflows that are optimized around tasks rather than around the people performing those tasks.
High-performing knowledge firms and digital HQ designers are unwilling to accept this as the status quo. Instead, they ask what it would be like to work in an online space that:
- Enabled employees to do their jobs with less friction
- Streamlined the access and sharing of knowledge
- Made team formation and alignment easier
- Empowered managers with tools for employee listening
- Encouraged connection and collaboration
These digital HQs provide a coherent set of online spaces where knowledge sharing, listening, feedback, collaboration, and productivity tools work together to improve the employee experience. At Slalom, we call the constellation of capabilities needed to achieve this type of HQ the “digital HQ floorplan.” Like a building floorplan, you can think of a digital HQ floorplan as being carved up into rooms for your digital work capabilities, with locations penciled in for the people, processes, and technology that jointly support flourishing knowledge work.
That said, knowledge work in 2019 also had a digital floorplan. The difference is that the access to rooms was typically mediated by bringing people together in physical offices. When working through these tools failed, in-person work was always there as a backup. Couldn’t figure out where to find the latest internal market intelligence research? Or documentation guidelines on a wiki seem out of date? No problem — just pull the team together quickly or walk by your manager’s desk and sort things out. Work was co-located by default — it just happened to often take place through digital channels. But that’s no longer the case. Today and for the foreseeable future, knowledge work will be digital by default. The majority of it will happen online because that’s where knowledge workers now spend most of their workdays.
Widescale return to offices and the implementation of hybrid work plans won’t change this default. This is the challenge ahead for many organizations that thought they were just temporarily occupying their digital workspace. It was one thing to patch together the capabilities needed to enable a digital HQ in 2020 and just “live with it” for the last two years; it’s another thing altogether for an organization to step back and acknowledge that work will be digital by default for the foreseeable future. Organizations that regarded their digital workplace as more of a short-term stay than a forever home are starting to realize that they’re overdue for renovations. Those that have taken a step back are realizing that their digital headquarters is the workspace in which their teams will be operating for years to come.
Even if the tools and practices of today have “worked” for the last two years, we know that things could be so much better. Meetings have bloated, chats have exploded, and time for focus work has gotten pushed to the edges of the workday. Knowledge workers are insisting on something better and discovering that shifting to hybrid work doesn’t simply make problems go away. There’s a growing realization that even small improvements in the effectiveness of our digital work practices can have a compounding impact on the organization’s performance.
The longer organizations delay these renovations because they’re “just too busy” or because “it’s not great, but it’s not broken either,” the harder and more expensive it will become for leaders to fix the leaks and cracks in their digital HQs down the line. While your organization might be licensing its digital tools, you are not temporarily occupying your digital workplace — it’s your forever home. Establishing a digital HQ program is your commitment to take that reality seriously.
Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Learn more about Slalom’s partnership with Slack and reach out today.
