Measuring ROO

Digital workplace solutions often have loftier goals that help improve a company’s performance, but they don’t always have an obvious impact on the bottom line. That’s why you have to set key objectives right from the start. Whether it’s reducing the number of emails sent, aligning your teams around a specific vision, or sharing knowledge more efficiently, you have to be clear on what you’re trying to achieve.

There are two primary categories of intangible business objectives that you’ll want to explore:

1. People: talent, knowledge, and relationships that your employees possess
2. Culture: employees’ shared values and connection to the company mission

The people perspective

A digital workplace can serve as a platform for maximizing the value of your people, enhancing how you onboard and develop them. It can facilitate the delivery of training while helping to bring together people across the organization by establishing informal networks that live outside the hierarchy. 

If you can measure whether the workforce is fully trained in support of a specific goal or share anecdotes that provide proof of the value of the network, that’s all you’ll need. The more ways people have to learn and access knowledge, the better.

The cultural perspective

As an organization grows, a digital workplace can serve as a platform for communication and engagement. It can advance the conversation, build trust, and open up the flow of information and knowledge to, from, and among employees. 

An assessment of employee perceptions has typically relied on surveys, but it's possible to tap into the power of technology, too. Use online discussions to foster dialogue and measure participation through analytics. The more passionate employees feel about their jobs and the better they understand overarching goals, the more discretionary effort they'll give.

To get you started, here are three areas where you can set objectives: 

Never discount the intangible or hard-to-measure benefits of your digital workplace solution.  While appraising the ROI of your digital workplace, acknowledge the immense untapped, intangible value that's perhaps even more critical than what can be measured in dollars and cents. When properly deployed, digital workplace solutions can dramatically improve corporate culture, knowledge sharing, employee retention, and – as a result – the customer experience. 

Why it matters

The people and cultural perspective both ladder up to employee engagement, and there's an abundance of research that shows the bottom-line impact of an engaged employee base.

• Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organization. (Corporate Leadership Council)  
• Engaged companies grow profits as much as 3x faster than their competitors. (Corporate Leadership Council)  
• Companies with low engagement scores earn an operating income of 32.7% lower than companies with more engaged employees. (David MacLeod and Nita Clarke) 
• Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by more than 200%. (Dale Carnegie)  
• Most-engaged workplaces experience 2x higher customer loyalty, 2x higher productivity, and 2x lower turnover. (Jonathan Pont)