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What Makes an Award-Winning Digital Workplace?
Digital Workplace

What Makes an Award-Winning Digital Workplace?

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4 minutes read time
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Published on Jun 26th, 2018
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Written by Janine Marchi

Liberty Mutual's recent implementation of the Workgrid Assistant has earned them not one but two digital workplace awards! The awards include the 2018 Digital Workplace of the Year Award by the Digital Workplace Group in partnership with SMG/CMSWire and the Platinum level Step Two Intranet and Digital Workplace Award. These awards both celebrate organizations which have excelled at creating well-executing, result driven digital workplace environments.
Winning the Digital Workplace of the Year Award is not an easy task, in fact the judges scrutinized the participating organizations to see how they perform across strategy, business case, governance framework, key features, user engagement and the overall business impact.

So, what makes an award-winning digital workplace?

We sat down with Troy Campano, the Senior Enterprise Architect who drove the digital workplace strategy at Liberty Mutual to get the full scoop.

Can you describe the strategy of Liberty Mutual's Digital Workplace?

Liberty Mutual's digital workplace strategy aligns with our company-wide focus on continuously improving and innovating. By investing in new and emerging technologies to automate internal business processes and improve employees' lives we created a digital work environment where employees' technical interactions at work are as personalized and intuitive as in their everyday lives.
The goal of our digital workplace is to deliver an exceptional experience for our employees that will simplify their day and help them become more productive, engaged and collaborative while also empowering them to focus on high value work.

What was the business case for a digital assistant?

Implementing a digital assistant for our digital workplace was driven by user demand. We heard from various surveys, focus groups, and general feedback that employees wanted a unified location to see notifications and manage work.

The problem was all of the business systems we had put in place to improve processes or make employees' lives easier were becoming disparate and siloed. There were countless applications to log in to, administrative tasks to complete, and notifications and messages in different locations that employees reported spending too much valuable time navigating.
The amount of systems employees were required to access had become overwhelming, causing significant productivity, engagement and communication delays

This feedback from employees became a catalyst to make a change. We looked to see what people were using in their personal lives and thought about how we could bring those technologies into the workplace to create the same level of experiences inside the company.

What are the key features that impressed the judges?

The judges told us

"

"We were especially impressed with their strategic approach, with a clear focus on simplifying employees lives and impressive features, including a personalized Digital Assistant, a Chatbot for IT help, and a mobile app for anywhere access."

"

"This is awesome! Approvals on a smart watch is fantastic!! Integrated approvals on any device is what everyone wants but no one does. And a chatbot too? Incredibly thoughtful and built in a way that allows it to grow."

The features of the digital assistant were designed around simplifying the day for our employees and creating an environment that frees employees to focus on high value work.
The main features evolved around:

  • Unified view of approvals, notifications, communications and tasks from multiple enterprise systems

  • Chatbot to help automate tasks and provide answers to common questions

  • Mobile access to the most important information employees need to get their jobs done

Can you describe the impact of the digital assistant?

We heard from employees after we did sentiment that the #1 word to describe it was "Love", as in "I love this!" We knew we had something powerful that made a really positive impact on employee experience at Liberty Mutual. Employees were really excited by this technology and loved using it, something you often don't hear from employees talking about enterprise software.

By bringing together disparate internal systems to push action items to employees, we have reduced the amount of email noise and simplified employees' search for answers. Now, employees can complete tasks much faster and with less aggravation. Employees have seen large productivity gains by reducing the amount of wasted time spent having to log in to and navigating across multiple systems rarely designed for the everyday user, just to get nominal, but necessary tasks done.
On average, the digital assistant saves each employee more than 3 hours a week. In a company of 50,000 employees, that equates to millions annually in productivity savings.

It also provided substantial benefits for the modernization of our enterprise systems as we can now leverage the digital assistant platform to seamlessly plug into an application's backend, abstracting the employee experience away from the source systems and toward a single, modern, intuitive interface—one that employees use 80% more than the source systems.

What recommendations and advice would you give others?

Consider working closely with employees throughout the process. At Liberty Mutual, we heavily used Human Centered Design and Design Thinking along the way in building out the digital assistant. We worked hand in hand with employees, which lead us to creating something unique and really powerful as it was completely driven by employee feedback.

This was something new for us in terms of defining features and use cases, but it ensured we were solving real pain points for employees. Without employee feedback and collaboration along the way, it's unlikely you're going to create a solution that is impact-full for employees, or a solution that employees will use to actually get work done.


Here at Workgrid, we're proud to be part of Liberty Mutual's mission to creating exceptional digital experiences for employees, where employees' technical interactions at work can be as personalized, timely, and intuitive as their everyday lives.

We hope sharing this interview gives other organizations the ability to gain insights and knowledge they can benefit from as they continue on their very own digital workplace journey.

To learn more about the Liberty Mutual implementation of an employee digital assistant, check out the following case study.

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