Whether still labeled “intranet” or subsumed as part of an employee experience platform, a portal that provides employees quick and easy access to digital work resources and company information while also supporting and encouraging engagement remains an important element of many companies’ efforts to optimize employee experience and build company culture.

“While also supporting and encouraging engagement” is a key differentiator between the traditional intranet, born in the mid-1990s as an internal-facing version of the Internet, and today’s iteration. This is critical as companies look to address the chief pain point that Metrigy’s workplace collaboration research reveals about remote work today: loss of community and culture. Another difference between the old and new is the ability to support a broader set of employees with more access options and the use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to create a more personalized experience on a per-employee basis.

Few companies don’t have or aren’t planning to implement an intranet today, as we’ve seen in our Employee Experience: 2023-24 research benchmark study with 499 companies globally. This study shows that nearly 75% of companies already have an intranet in place today (48.3%) or are planning to implement one by year’s end (24.2%). An additional 18.2% have an intranet on their adoption roadmaps for as early as 2024, or are evaluating their options.

The approach to the company intranet continues to evolve. For example, the build-your-own days are in the past for most companies. Metrigy’s data shows that 55.8% of companies with an intranet today have purchased an intranet platform, vs. 36.7% that still have a homegrown intranet in place.

Also behind us are the days in which the only employees with intranet access were knowledge workers. The majority of companies in our employee experience research are providing intranet access to all employees: 86.4% to desk/office workers, 79.4% to customer-facing employees such as contact center agents or service desk personnel, and 71.5% to frontline workers who are out in the “field” and don’t have desks. Browser and desktop apps remain the primary means that employees use to access the intranet, for 65.7% and 53.7% of companies, but many have extended access to means more suitable for the frontline workforce and others away from their desks. Nearly 48% offer a mobile app, and just shy of 40% allow access via digital signage, a kiosk, or other shared terminal.

As mentioned, AI and automation are becoming integral to the modern intranet, especially as companies look to engage employees with contextually relevant information. Using advanced techniques, companies no longer must deliver the same set of information to all users accessing the intranet. Rather, they can surface content based on factors such as geography, organization, personal preferences, or role. Such is the top use case for nearly 65% of companies using an intranet today, with communicating corporate news a close follower—with some of that news likely tailored to individual employees, as well, at companies that are using AI and automation.

And, getting to that cultural pain point noted above, 51.7% say building and sustaining corporate culture is a top use case for them. Of course, such efforts are all for naught if employees aren’t actually bothering to use the intranet. Companies seem to be on the right track, though, in drawing employees in. In the Employee Experience study, two-thirds of companies using an intranet say employees access the portal at least three times a week.

To discover more insights from our employee experience research, clients can reach out to client services and others can contact us here.

Generative AI is moving from concept to reality. A proactive approach is required to ensure success.

Generative AI has captured technology media headlines since the launch of ChatGPT nearly a year ago. The appeal of GenAI is that it can replace mundane tasks and improve productivity and efficiency; the concern is that this technology could be so disruptive, it replaces human employees entirely.

Even as we all sift through the benefits and threats that GenAI presents, communications and collaboration vendors have rushed to bring GenAI capabilities to their platforms, in some cases announcing previews before they were fully available. In the last several months the GenAI space has accelerated. Here are some of the products that have been announced or released:

These recent announcements follow releases, previews, and roadmaps from just about every other collaboration provider from Cisco to Dialpad, Notion to RingCentral, and more. GenAI capabilities range from assistants for content creation; auto-transcription, summarization, and action item identification in meetings and phone calls; and real-time and after-call coaching and feedback. Tomorrow, capabilities will continue to improve and expand.

As GenAI moves from preview to reality, IT leaders are faced with the challenge of understanding the value, as well as assessing the potential risk, and determining when and how to deploy GenAI capabilities to their workforce.

Key concerns these leaders should consider include:

COST

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

Hybrid work offers employees flexibility, but they run the risk of losing out to those who are in the office full time. Unified communications tools can help close the gap.

Many companies have come to learn that a hybrid workplace strategy that enables employees to choose when they work in an office or from home can be both a blessing and a curse. Although employees may appreciate the flexibility and quality-of-life improvements hybrid work provides, they may also feel burdened by it.

In particular, some employees end up feeling they’re dividing their time between office and home not based on their own needs and preferences, but rather on those of their managers and colleagues. If they don’t show face when others do, they’ll lose their voice in collaborative meetings and risk the chance their input is treated less seriously than that of team members who are physically present.

Indeed, fending off proximity bias in the workplace is one of the biggest challenges leaders face when overseeing a hybrid workplace. Enabling a culture where remote workers are made to feel less committed than their in-office counterparts can quickly lead to a toxic environment, rather than an environment meant to be open and embracing of work-life balance.

Unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools, such as team chat and video meeting software, are essential components of today’s hybrid work paradigm. They are now evolving to break down the barriers between in-office and at-home employees. Companies would do well to explore how they can take advantage.

Here are five ways to use UC and collaboration tools to reduce proximity bias in the workplace.

1. Support spontaneous brainstorming among disparate team members

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 20223 study gathered data from 1,400 end-user organizations to provide insight into purchasing plans and vendor supporting collaboration. In this webinar we’ll share a snapshot of market forecasts, vendors, spending, what technologies correlate with WC success:
Topics include:

Workplace Collaboration Market Outlook and Vendor Trends in 2023

Presented by: Diane Myers, Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: October 31, 2023
Time: 11:00 am ET

VIEW REPLAY

Sam Wilson, formerly CFO, CCO, and interim CEO, at 8×8, was recently named CEO. In this episode, we’ll talk to Sam to learn how his experience has prepared him for this role, and what 8×8’s strategy is to differentiate from competitors and grow revenue.

A digital workplace, by any name, is where it’s the enterprise buzz is at. But what is a digital workplace? According to the people who use one, it’s the hub in which employees not only collaborate with peers, but also manage most of their work.

The idea of a digital workplace or workspace, or hub—call it what you will—is one of those amorphous concepts that seems to take the shape of whoever is leading the initiative and whatever business challenges they’re trying to solve. So, when I hear one or another of these terms, or other variations, I always have to stop and think, “OK, what is ‘digital workspace’ this time, exactly?!”

A half-dozen years ago, in a post she wrote for WorkSpace Connect sister site, No Jitter, my colleague Robin Gareiss, Metrigy CEO, described the high-level function of a digital workplace as integrating, customizing, and leveraging technology to make people more productive. “By consolidating numerous enterprise apps, collaboration apps, electronic forms, and functions into a single, personalized dashboard, accessed by any device anywhere, people can work more efficiently,” she said.

At the time, some pitched the idea of the digital workplace as an extension of a traditional corporate intranet. Robin argued that it was much more, particularly because it would incorporate much more, including communications and collaboration applications. Today, we often hear that those very things, especially team collaboration apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, are the digital workplace platforms themselves.

In Metrigy’s “Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24” global study of 440 companies, 52.7% say they view their team collaboration app as the hub in which employees not only collaborate with peers, but also manage most of their work. The 29.3% that view team collaboration as “just a messaging app” might want to reconsider: Two thirds of the most successful companies benchmarked for this study think of their team collaboration app as their central work hub (with success determined by revenue growth, cost savings, and productivity improvements).

Continue reading at workspace-connect.com.

Metrigy’s research shows that more than most companies now use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, messaging, and meetings. Adoption of Teams Phone for PSTN voice calling is relatively low in comparison, but is growing rapidly as companies begin to realize the benefits of leveraging Teams for both collaboration and as their enterprise phone system.

Teams Phone offers a number of benefits, including potential cost savings, a simplified user experience, access to rapidly emerging AI-based features, connectivity to existing PSTN voice carrier services and simplified UC and collaboration management. Also, while Teams Phone is feature rich enough to support the voice calling needs of most companies, it can integrate seamlessly with existing PBX and analog equipment if organizations still need these for operational reasons or are bound by long-term service/support agreements. But success requires adopting the right mix of endpoints for calling and meetings, optimizing PSTN connectivity, and ensuring proactive end-to-end management.

To achieve success, IT leaders should:

Download the full report at audiocodes.com.

BlueJeans, a Pioneer in video meetings, reaches end of life – and we can learn three significant things with its sunsetting.

Verizon Business’ announcement on August 16 that it was sunsetting BlueJeans came as a blow to many of us in the UC and collaboration industry who have closely followed the service for many years.

BlueJeans was a pioneer in delivering high-quality meeting experiences with both integrated hardware and software. Via its partnership with Dolby, BlueJeans brought innovations to the market that included support for spatial audio, allowing meeting participants to sense the position of remote participants, as well as sophisticated noise cancellation. Many of you may even remember the BlueJeans noise-cancelling demos at past Enterprise Connects where the presenters used a hair dryer to show how BlueJeans cancelled background noise during meetings. And BlueJeans brought features to meetings such as the ability to add notes and capture clips to meeting recordings, long before many of its competitors. In our research we found that BlueJeans was well liked by its customers with BlueJeans recently earning top honors in our MetrigyMetriStar Awards for meeting applications.

Unfortunately, BlueJeans wasn’t well positioned to take advantage of the rapid adoption of video meetings during the COVID-driven shift to work-from-home in 2020. Zoom, through its freemium model, quickly captured the lions’ share of the consumer market while it continued to make inroads in the business market as well. Microsoft and Google gained share by bundling their meeting apps into their broader workplace collaboration suites. And Cisco was able to leverage its already extensively deployed Webex conferencing app to expand its video footprint. Meanwhile other stand-alone meeting vendors like GoTo Meeting and UberConference became part of larger UC suites.

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

Metrigy Releases Employee Experience 2023-24 Research Study

This study examines technologies and strategies that organizations use to understand employee behavior, assess employee sentiment, and optimize employee experience.

September 11, 2023 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy has released its Employee Experience 2023-24 research study. Metrigy conducted research with 499 participants in eight countries and 39 industries.

“As companies continue to evolve their workplace strategies, understanding and optimizing employee experience remains a primary goal. Toward this end, Metrigy research shows continued adoption of employee experience technology, as well as refresh of strategic initiatives,” says Beth Schultz, Metrigy Vice President of Research and Principal Analyst.

This study covers the following areas:

Metrigy evaluated key business metrics, including employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention, associated with the adoption of employee experience platform, intranet, voice of the employee, and enterprise search products. Those in the individual success groups for at least half of the technology areas qualified for the overall success group.

As part of the study, Metrigy examined how successful companies differ from others in their approaches to employee experience technology adoption and strategy. Some key findings are:

This report is available for purchase on our website here.

Just as it is for customer experience, sentiment data is critical for understanding employee experience. This makes voice-of-the-employee applications just as important to optimizing EX as voice-of-the-customer software is to guiding CX transformation.

With voice-of-the-employee software, companies can gather employee sentiment in the moment or at pre-defined intervals, such as quarterly or annually. Depending on how and when gathered, the data provides a window into how employees feel about their jobs, career development, the workplace, relationships with their managers and peers, corporate policy, trending topics, current corporate activities, and so on. Most companies understand the value of gathering employee sentiment data, as Metrigy found in its newly published Employee Experience: 2023-24 global research study of 499 companies globally.

Toward that end, one third of the companies are already using voice-of-the-employee software, while many more are either planning for adoption in 2023 (29.9%), have this technology on their roadmaps for as early as 2024 (14.6%), or are evaluating it. And of those already using, at least 70% are doing so to gather feedback from all types of employees—desk/office workers, customer-facing agents, and frontline workers.

Surveying at key journey moments, such as onboarding or job advancement, is most in use, for 64.0%. This practice most correlates with success, as well. Nearly 71% of this study’s success group, as determined by gains in employee productivity, retention, and satisfaction, are gathering employee sentiment at key journey moments, compared to 45.8% of the non-succcess group.

A second-best approach is conducting topical polls, our study shows. While more companies overall are gathering sentiment data via annual surveys (57.9%) and from enterprise social channels (38.4%), polling employees on topical issues meets with success more so than these two. Nearly 37% of all companies and 55.9% of the success group gather employee sentiment via topical polls, compared to a third on the non-success group. Further, surveying annually or at another set interval actually least correlates to success: 41.2% of the success group, compared to 66.7% of the non-success group.

Of course, gathering sentiment data is just the starting point—and a quick dead-end if a company does nothing more. Overall, fewer than half of companies are analyzing sentiment data and taking action on the insights gleaned, and only 40.9% are taking action plus circling back with employees to let them know of the changes implemented because their voices were heard. The success group does better in both cases: 61.8% gather, analyze, and act on employee sentiment, and 47.1% close the loop with employees.

Of those using employee sentiment data, most are using it both to influence near-term decisions or actions and to predict changes in key metrics, such as productivity, retention, and satisfaction. This latter is them more important of the two, for 54.4% vs. 45.6%.

Optimizing employee experience requires continuous improvement. And no company can get there without the ability to gather and use employee sentiment.

Clients interested in an outbriefing on our employee experience research can reach out to client services; others, please contact us here.