The worlds of employee experience and enterprise communications and collaboration are converging, an inevitable trend accelerated by the quick rise of the hybrid workplace over recent years. The more digital the workplace becomes, the greater the need for companies to bring the two together, especially if they’re grappling with a loss of community and culture–– the top pain point of today’s hybrid workplace, identified as such by nearly 41% of the 440 organizations that participated in Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 research study.
Among other examples, this is the basic understanding that propelled Microsoft to launch its employee experience platform, Viva, back in 2021. And it’s what led to Zoom’s longtime stake in and, ultimately, its acquisition of employee experience platform provider, Workvivo, this quarter (read a MetriNote on the latter).
Employee experience platforms designed to serve a digital workforce can support many functions, but communications and engagement are often at their core. That is, they provide a digital home that employees come to read about and share reactions to company news and information as well as to engage with each other in social media-style communities of shared interests. The goal, circling back to that above-mentioned cultural pain point, is to make sure employees feel emotionally connected to the company and with each other. Although more productivity-oriented than employee experience platforms, communications and collaboration applications can serve a similar purpose in forging a sense of connectivity and cultural awareness among people who often no longer work together but virtually.
When viewing them in tandem, a company gains the ability to assess the impact of engagement- and productivity-driven communications and collaboration together. Bringing together engagement data from the one side with behavioral data from the other side will give companies a much fuller view of employee experience than possible when looking at it with just one set of measures. It opens a pathway, too, between HR, IT, and internal communications, which too often work in silo around employee experience deliverables.
Gidi Pridor, CMO at Workvivo who I spoke with for our latest MetriSight episode (tune in here), sees convergence of employee experience and communications/collaboration as an evolution that’s already seen a move away from the traditional employee intranet to a platform that brings together engagement, communications, employee listening, and knowledge management. What’s coming, he proposes, is a digital workplace platform that acts as “the center of gravity for everything.” That is, a single environment where communications, be is synchronous or asynchronous, gets managed.
Architecturally, how that digital workplace environment is constructed remains to be seen, as Pridor says. Perhaps it is truly a single platform or maybe it’s a tightly integrated collection of platforms. I can’t help but to think of a similar convergence of capabilities such as document collaboration, project management, knowledge management, and team chat we’ve seen in workplace hubs from companies such as Clickup and Notion. Why not bring all of this and an integrated employee experience-collaboration platform all together?
