Get ready to ramp up your workplace happiness quota

A happy workforce is a productive workforce. Yet, IDC recently found that 34 percent of employees were not satisfied with their at-work technology.* And, at Sogeti, we know that being content at work is increasingly determined by technology. That’s especially the case amongst the growing number of digital natives forging a new generation of professionals.

Digital natives want to choose whether they work on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. And they want to use their own device, not a company-owned one. They expect to be given access to all the applications, business systems and personal data they need to do their work from anywhere, at any time.

That sounds OK on paper, but IT leaders also need to balance these employee demands with the need for safety, manageability, and availability. And how do they keep up with the rapidly changing IT product set as digital continues to evolve at pace?

In this blog, I consider what it takes to build a smart work environment that keeps employees happy, yet meets the need for safe, manageable and always-available IT/connectivity. My advice is to take things one step at a time and to build a smart work environment in a modular way. This will enable you to constantly add new functions and dispose of outdated ones as and when necessary.

Happy employees also don’t want the hassle of different log-in codes or passwords. So, another important condition for a smart work environment is that you make friends with Single Sign-On. It will certainly prevent a great deal of frustration.

You’ll have seen where I am coming from in all of this. It’s about putting user needs at the heart of everything you do in the modern workplace. A smart work environment is based on three basic functions: information, communication, and collaboration. It is important to organize these functions from the perspective of the user. Put the user, not the technology, at the center of your decision making. How does your employee want to be informed? How do your colleagues want to work together successfully? And which tools do they need for this?

From self-service, IT support portals and digital collaboration tools, to a pay-per-use cloud-based model for all your IT hardware and software, the smart work environment – or SMART Workspace, as Sogeti terms it – will make a significant contribution to your employee happiness.