What’s up in the digital workplace 2022?

1.   Intranet and digital workplaces will continue to support the hybrid workplace.
This will drive the development of intranets forward. If you have not already reviewed your intranet and its usage, now is the time! Although we increasingly have begun to work on-site again, there is no question that the hybrid workplace is here to stay.

2.   The demarcation between our private life and work-life will be blurred, but not as you might think. 
An issue that has been on the agenda during the pandemic years is the difficulty of drawing the line between private life and work. It does not take much imagination to understand the difficulty to disconnect from work when you are working from home. 

Don’t get us wrong, this is an important topic that we collectively need to address, but it’s not what we are getting at. Instead, it is how we consume information that will change. User-generated content and functions from social media have already found their way into our digital workplace. In 2022 we believe that this will trend even more. Just a year ago, podcasts were relatively little used by companies to communicate with their employees. Now more people are talking about using podcasts as a channel. We look forward with excitement to who will be the first to use TikTok in a corporate context. 

3. Microsoft Viva. 
If you’re not familiar with Viva, 2022 will likely be the year when you will get to know the platform. Viva is a relatively new employee experience platform (launched in 2021) that can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. Viva covers communication, knowledge management, learning, collaboration, and more. This puts Viva right in the centre of the users’ needs. 

Viva got several things going for it: it is integrated with Microsoft Teams (which has become the single most significant digital collaboration space), but above all, Viva takes its starting point from the employee’s perspective and revolves around what he needs to work, and that leads us to number 4 on the list. 

4.   Employee-centric intranets.  
In 2021, more and more companies will focus on creating a good employee experience for their intranets. A user-centred intranet can contribute to increasing the well-being of employees by, for example, reducing the flow of information. We believe this trend will continue in 2022. It may even be part of the solution to the digital stress that employees experience. 

5. Learning will continue to be a success factor for the digital workplace.  
Every time we discuss digital workplace trends, learning is a topic we tend to return to. Sadly, the development in this area is painstakingly slow. Educations in general, and digital education in particular, are often associated with a waste of time by employees (yes, we are generalizing here). We hope that 2022 is the year when learning seriously ends up in the focus of the digital workplace. The pandemic has increased the need to develop employees’ skills digitally. This, together with the emergence of new players in the market that offer modern LMS (Learning Management System) and new e-learning suppliers that do not mass-produce courses, means that we include learning on the list this year.