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The workplace is where the work is
What comes to mind when you think of “the workplace”? The chances are high that you thought of a place, a physical location, probably an office, where people go to work. Or maybe, thanks to the prevalence of working from home during the pandemic, you imagined someone sitting at their kitchen table or on the couch, laptop open and smartphone in hand. But what if neither of these scenarios is the best way to think about the workplace anymore? As the COVID-19 experience forcefully demonstrated, people don’t have to be together physically to work together. Nor does working from home pose insuperable barriers to productivity. Indeed, productivity can improve when working from home, though it does create new challenges.
We all know that much work today takes place in digital rather than physical space. We use technology to interact with business processes, collect and analyse data, and draft reports; to communicate, collaborate, and knit teams together across spatial and organizational boundaries. Work is now digital and mobile, enabling the work to go (digitally) to the workers.
The workplace, in other words, is no longer the place where the workers go to work. Nor is the workplace where the worker is, as digital work is independent of a physical place. The new workplace is where the work lives: the shared digital environment used by a team, the collection of digital collaboration and communication tools that workers navigate as they find ways to get things done.
Working in the digital space creates a challenge for organizations. Practices and norms that drive productivity in the physical workplace don’t necessarily work as well in the digital one, and may even be counterproductive. You can’t encourage remote workers to connect with each other by putting table soccer tables in the office lounge or providing a catered lunch. It’s harder to standardize tools and technologies when workers need to improvise solutions to unanticipated (digital) challenges and have countless options available for download. Tasks as simple as whiteboarding may trip some people up when they need to do it via Zoom or Teams instead of just picking up a marker.
Because these kinds of challenges are specific to working digitally, creating a productive digital workplace begins with shifting one’s mindset from thinking about the workplace as a location to thinking of it as a network of digitally mediated relationships and interactions. Grounded in this viewpoint, organizations can more easily find new ways to promote collaboration, information-sharing, and creative problem-solving among teams working digitally, while compensating for any losses suffered through lack of in-person contact. The goal: to empower teams to quickly find their own solutions to both expected and unexpected challenges, the better to succeed in an unpredictable and fast-changing world.
Workers today experience three overlapping workplaces
Before exploring what drives productivity in a digital work environment, it’s useful to understand how digital technologies have split the workplace into three overlapping types.
The physical workplace is where workers work, whether it’s at the office, at home, or in a third place such as a café. Traditionally, the physical workplace has been the particular location where people gather to do their work. Prior to digital technology, the physical workplace, by necessity, was the only workplace for the majority of workers. Workers commuted to the work, placing them in contact with materials, tools, and co-workers so they could interact with the people, things, and information they needed to do their jobs. Even now, when technology allows people to work from anywhere, the physical workplace has remained our dominant concept of the workplace. The digital workspace might be an emerging fourth space, a new environment requiring new norms that are still emerging.
XpertLab – Web development Company in Junagadh
The mass adoption of digital technology created two additional digital workplaces operating in parallel with the physical. First, there’s the personal digital workplace, which consists of the tools and technologies making up an individual’s personal digital environment. These days, the personal digital workplace blends a worker’s own devices and services with those provided by the organization they work for, blurring professional and private concerns. Then, we have shared digital workplaces: the web of relationships, facilitated by digital media, within which people interact with their teammates. A worker’s personal digital workplace is their window into the digital world around them, both within the firm and to the public, that they use to discover and access the information and services they need to navigate their personal and professional lives.
The personal digital workplace is where workers work on tasks that they are solely responsible for. Shared digital workplaces, in contrast, are where teams gather to work together. While each worker has a single personal digital workplace, they can be involved in a number of shared digital workplaces, one for each team or workgroup they interact with.
XpertLab – Web development Company in Junagadh
These three types of workplaces have been gradually separating as digital technology has woven itself into the fabric of both society and work. Initially, digital technology was simply a tool to manage structured information—as with departmental computing in the ’70s—and neither personal nor shared digital workplaces existed. The development of commercial groupware applications (software to help people working on a common task, Lotus Notes being an early example) in the ’90s digitized collaboration and started the divergence between the physical and shared digital workplaces. The growth of consumer digital technology in the late ’90s and early 2000s, including the mass adoption of the internet along with personal email, social media, and bring-your-own-device, triggered the divergence of the personal digital workplace from the shared digital workplaces.
When COVID-19 struck, the personal and shared digital workplaces were suddenly separated from the physical one. This separation is commonly seen as a shift from working in the office to working from home, but it can be more productively thought of as a shift to working purely digitally, as workers could choose to work anywhere other than the office; it’s just that for many of us, this happened to be working from home. Rather than working with digital tools in a physical workplace, we suddenly found ourselves in a workplace defined by digital technology.
Importantly, this separation occurred at a time when teams have become the main vehicle for prosecuting work. The progressive unbundling of the firm has made it necessary for increasingly heterogeneous teams—with members drawn from a range of organizations, not just a single one—to be responsible for different portions of an organization’s activities. And because teams are where the work is done, the team is also where problems and challenges must be identified and solved. Work is becoming more social and less task-based, as automation drives workers to work together and improve operations, identify problems, and craft solutions, rather than execute tasks. The shared digital workplaces in which teams work thus takes on outsized importance in helping or hindering team effectiveness—especially when it is not supported by in-person interaction.
The pandemic-driven exodus from the physical workplace spawned many research projects looking at the challenges of creating a productive workplace at home (the physical workplace), or how a firm’s investment in digital tooling and training could smooth the transition to working digitally (the personal workplace). The results of these studies have been mixed. A survey of UK workers early in the pandemic reported that they were more productive when working from home. More comprehensive work by Japanese researchers later in the pandemic, however, showed that productivity was significantly lower. Other work in the United States found little difference or slightly lower productivity when working from home. Additionally, these findings are somewhat difficult to interpret, as survey participants may have confounded productivity in the sense of output per unit of time with productivity in the sense of overall output. There is anecdotal evidence that many workers simply worked longer hours during the pandemic, investing time that was previously spent commuting in work rather than leisure. The variability in these results may well have resulted from differences in workers’ experience of their shared digital workplace—whether they and their organizations were successful in establishing a common digital environment that facilitated work rather than getting in the way. If so, the important question then becomes: What does it take to establish a productive, shared digital workplace? We explored this issue in a survey conducted in the second half of 2020 where we polled 430 people working from home. Forced remote work created a unique opportunity to isolate what happens in a digital workplace when the physical workplace is completely removed, allowing us to glimpse the nature of the digital workplace in a nearly pure form.
What makes digital teams productive? Three important attributes
Our study showed that the individuals who smoothly transitioned to working from home were typically those who were members of mid-sized teams. Independent workers such as freelancers, or workers caught up in very large teams and bureaucracies, had a harder time adapting. Indeed, membership in a moderately sized team of 2–12 individuals was a stronger predictor of a smooth transition to remote work than the worker’s own digital skills or the tooling and training their firm provided. This implies that, if team membership rather than an individual’s knowledge and skill is what most strongly determines success in a digital work environment, then our focus should be on preparing and empowering teams, not just individuals.
Our study identified three attributes common to productive digital teams: psychological safety, digital competence, and management support for experimentation and flexibility. The more successfully an organization can encourage these attributes, the more productive its teams’ shared digital workplaces will be, and the more productive its workers will therefore be.
