Overview

This best practice provides recommendations to help clearly define your goals and objectives for your digital workplace solution.

Recommendation

To set appropriate goals  and objectives for your digital workplace, you need to understand its purpose.  Once you define the Purpose, you will have a much easier time defining measurable goals. Purpose is defined by your particular business challenges you are trying to solve; who you are solving them for; and what your expectations are for success. 

Digital workplace business challenges typically fall into one of the following four key categories: 

1. Communications
2. Collaboration
3. Knowledge Management
4. Culture and engagement. 

To get you started, we recommend reviewing and answering the following questions. Don't forget to align your answers to the categories mentioned above. 

What are your organization’s most pressing business challenges? 

If you’re not sure, we recommend asking the leader of each Line of Business the following question: “What keeps you up at night?” Their response will provide you with insight into their most pressing issues and allow you to determine how to address them in your Digital Workplace. The Purpose of your Digital Workplace must include supporting the most pressing business challenges with Igloo Solutions. 

Who are you solving these challenges for? 

The answer to this question will enable you to define your user personas. Our standard user personas include what we like to refer to as the “me”, the “we”, and the “us”. The “me” persona represents employees, the “we” persona represents managers and the “us” persona represents the executives. Keeping this in mind, take a stab at defining the various personas that will be using your Digital Workplace. Your Digital Workplace must support the objectives and needs of all three.

What are your key business goals for your Digital Workplace? 

How can your Digital Workplace support the business challenges presented by our Line of Business Leaders and how will it meet the expectations of the various user personas? Challenges we see most often center around Communication (eg. leadership transparency), Collaboration (eg. breaking down silos), Knowledge Management (eg. one source of truth) and Culture (eg. engaging employees). 

How can you measure whether you are successful in achieving these goals? 

What metrics would best demonstrate success? Measurement tools include Igloo's own Workplace Analytics in addition to the Activity Data on content, spaces and pages. Web Analytics includes third party tools, like Google Analytics and Heat Mapping. Custom Analytics is provided via Data Feeds which is an entire set of raw data you have access to, and can be formatted with your own third party Business Intelligence tool.

Defining S.M.A.R.T Goals

Below are several best practice samples that will aid you in creating SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Agreed Upon, Realistic, Time Bound)

Below are several best practices to consider when defining your goals.

Title:  An easily identifiable name of the goal. 

• Example: Improve governance of policies and procedures in HR. 

Purpose: Explain the rationale behind the goal – the “why”.

• Example: Improved governance of Policies and Procedures will help ensure that each policy reviewed and updated regularly, that all employees have access to the right information, and therefore have clear direction.

Ownership: Identify the groups in your organization who have ownership and responsibility of the goal.

•  Example: The CHRO is the Executive Sponsor of this goal and has assigned the responsibility to the Director of HR to achieve this goal with the support of his team.

Targets: Set clear milestones for your goal and celebrate the milestone successes. 

• Example: The current set of policies will be inventoried by June 1st. The current set of policies will be audited by June 15^th. Updating policies will be completed by June 30^th. Governance plan and future auditing schedule will be created by July 15^th. 

Stakeholder Impact: Identify and quantify the impact of goal upon the stakeholder groups in the project. Include which stakeholder group(s) and if necessary specific members of the groups are assigned ownership/responsibility of the goal.

• Example:  Creating a governance plan for HR’s Policies and Procedures has enabled the HR team to have confirmation by Read Receipt when each employee has read and understood each Policy and Procedure. Including a review schedule and ownership assigned of each document ensures that each is up to date. Having this formal confirmation that each employee has read, and understands the policies, allows the organization to reduce the risk associated with this process not being formalized. A simple example is the use of Hover Boards in the office, and the potential of injury when used by employees. Ensuring that a Policy is provided regarding the responsibility of each employee when they decide to use the hover board and confirming that they understand the risk and that they own the risk, reduces the potential fall out to the organization should injury occur.