Collaborative Workspace for Employee Engagement Leveraging Social Media Architecture

Abstract

Abstract Employee Engagement had long been a challenge for any organization in the world. The problem has been even worsened due to the enhanced endeavor on digital transformation, where most of the employees are left behind. In addition to that, the new (and young) generations who are heavily social media-oriented face substantial challenges to engage themselves into the workplaces, which are either very much traditional or much advanced to adopt and require substantial skills. The objective of this paper is to present a digital collaborative framework, intelligent digital Eco-System (iDES) for bringing multiple organizations and employees along with their work and communication into one single platform that engages all generations of employees. The framework is built addressing the architecture of a new of way of project management, the "Open Project Management" (OPM). Such framework will allow workers to engage in the organization by bringing personal lifestyle of using social network, which should trigger a cultural step change in the workplace. A digital collaborative work-space mimics popular social media platform. In the workspace the employees in the network are connected thru projects, and allows making of attractive dynamic reports by incorporating drawing visuals, complex analytics, cloud applications, videos and visualize their existing documents or presentations or spreadsheets to create their work-image. A project management capability, that allows synergism of traditional and agile approach, is introduced to have a truly team driven project management process for valued tasks, including an effective communication tool with a scheduler, video conferencing, and file sharing. eLearning modules facilitating easy training and knowledge share are also introduced for technology adoptions. Overall, the workspace is designed to have most of the work process within the system, allowing employees to display their work out of their siloed room structure to an open digital space. Such architecture of collaborative work space allows a creation of self-image, like social media, into the workplace, enhancing employee motivation towards work, increases multi generation employee participation in digital transformation and providing a transitional phase to any employee through the cultural step change required to implement digital transformation objectives. The comprehensive capability of performing tasks and engagement into one single place will create substantial amount of data related to human resources which can be utilized for further enhancement of employee engagement and empowerment. The novelty of the digital workspace lies in empowering people in many details and helps driving business by making them a fundamental building block in the digital transformation endeavor.