10 SharePoint Benefits to Build Effective Digital Workplaces

The concept of a digital enterprise has been with us for many years. However, as technologies and business environments change, so does the understanding of a digital enterprise and the depth of digitization. 

It started with business process automation and large-scale enterprise systems implementation that required huge investments and development effort. Later on, the digitalization spread more to bind together enterprise-wide business processes and people across geographies through the concept of a digital workplace.

Digital workplace has quickly become the core of the digital enterprise. Today it represents a software node providing employees with tools for daily work and collaboration with colleagues and third parties. 

The importance of a digital workplace has raised dramatically in 2020 after the traditional office setup collapsed in the wake of the lockdown. A few months later, when the light finally appeared at the end of the pandemic tunnel, businesses started to collect their staff’ feedback on remote work and learned that 77% of employees would prefer to keep on working remotely at least weekly, while 25%-30% would like to work remotely several days a week.

Since many companies continue working from home and don’t plan to come back to their offices earlier than 2021, the prospects are clear that the demand for workplace and collaboration software will only grow. The analysts from KBV Research say that the digital workplace market can reach $44.9 billion by 2026.

Microsoft SharePoint has been on the collaboration software market for almost 20 years. Some businesses and users love it, others hate, so you wouldn’t be alone in guessing why it is still so popular and what are the benefits of using SharePoint. 

With a plethora of good and bad opinions about this platform, we still have to admit that SharePoint is among the rare platforms that can help enterprises achieve success in building digital workplaces, instead of just covering some specific needs. 

In SharePoint consulting for over 20 years, we at Iflexion came up with the list of 10 SharePoint benefits, each of them making its owners closer to a fully functional digital workplace. Let’s go.

One of the toughest tasks for businesses building their digital workplaces is to address the needs of various teams. Indeed, it’s hard to provide accounting and sales departments with a single solution that would perfectly suit them both. Fortunately, SharePoint makes this task feasible.

SharePoint’s functional logic is built with different types of sites. A SharePoint site is the core of the platform and represents a set of tools for a variety of individual, team and corporate needs. The diversity of SharePoint sites is impressive, and Microsoft keeps on adding new types of sites to cover as many collaboration scenarios as possible. Team, communication, hub, project, community and enterprise wiki sites are just a few examples of SharePoint sites that businesses can tailor as part of their digital workplaces.

What is the business value? Instead of adopting a separate tool for every team, businesses can modify SharePoint sites and adapt them to various teams. Before taking up SharePoint customization, companies can go through SharePoint intranet examples to apply best practices while designing their digital workplaces.

When it comes to remote work, employees rarely spend working hours sitting in their chairs as opposed to working from the office. Mobile-friendly solutions are a must-have for businesses that want to ensure uninterrupted business processes across all devices. However, ensuring mobile access to corporate resources and employees’ digital workplaces isn’t easy. Some software products just don’t have a mobile version, others come with a limited mobile functionality, which doesn’t let users fulfill some of their tasks via mobile devices.

If we speak about the benefits of SharePoint, it comes with ready-to-use mobile apps for Android and iOS that help users manage their activities whether via their smartphones or tablets. All data and content get synchronized with the desktop workplace automatically.

What is the business value? Companies don’t have to invest in developing a mobile digital workplace from scratch. As businesses can have their mobile digital workplaces out-of-the-box, it also reduces the first-time launch substantially.

Some businesses might expand their staff, others might need to reduce the number of employees. These changes should be easily applicable to corporate digital workplaces as well. With SharePoint, staff fluctuations are no big deal because businesses, particularly those with SharePoint Online subscriptions, can flexibly adjust their digital workplace platforms to their context.

For example, if the headcount doubles within a year and the employees’ requirements regarding their digital workplace change, a company can easily move to a more advanced Office 365 subscription with more applications and capabilities. On the contrary, if a company faces difficulties, they can go for a basic SharePoint Online subscription for $5 or $10 per user per month.

What is the business value? Companies that have adopted a sophisticated system can find it painful to scale it up or down. As a result, complex solutions can either be too costly to expand to more users or lay idle when employees don’t use it. Both scenarios imply financial losses. Using SharePoint benefits, business owners can keep their deployments under control and scale it in line with their business needs, budget capabilities, and staff requirements.

Let’s not forget that a modern digital workplace isn’t about work only. It also has the mission of providing social support and development for employees. Some businesses run ongoing social initiatives, such as charity groups, educational events, awareness programs, etc. Others emphasize a healthy life-work balance and engage employees in all sorts of after-work activities, including sports events, games, hobby clubs, and more.

Companies can adapt different types of SharePoint sites to their social needs to launch comprehensive community portals, topical sites, media galleries, and social news boards. What’s more, a SharePoint-based digital workplace is the right place for gathering employees’ feedback, analyzing their engagement and loyalty, as well as timely responding to their requests. 

What is the business value? Social activities are oftentimes great motivators for employees and a good reason for them to stay loyal to the company they work for. While social initiatives aren’t directly related to business processes, they play a crucial role in building a corporate brand and setting up a work community that shows greater engagement and productivity than just a group of disintegrated employees.

Tracking individual and team productivity is yet another challenge for digital enterprises. Today, in order to achieve substantial improvements in business processes, it’s not enough to track employees’ working time and tasks. It’s also important to understand how employees distribute time between different activities to see whether the implemented solutions help them spend less effort on repeated tasks or only complicate simple workflows, and identify productivity bottlenecks and their optimal solutions.

In this context, SharePoint owners can start with tracking basic working metrics within team and project sites. They can follow project workflows, task distribution, and deadlines. Additional customization will allow implementing team productivity metrics to track various aspects of teamwork.

At the same time, those with comprehensive Office 365 subscriptions can access the dedicated MyAnalytics tool. The tool analyzes all users’ activities and demonstrates results in the form of compelling infographics. Moreover, depending on the calculated outcomes, the system provides employees with recommendations on how to improve their productivity and establish an optimal workflow.

What is the business value? By identifying bottlenecks in employees’ productivity, business owners can timely identify issues as well as process-related and technical inefficiencies and fix them. For example, if an employee spends too much time on a specific task, it doesn’t mean he or she is slow. This can point to potential issues in the task flow itself (say, too many approvers) or in the technology (say, the system doesn’t send timely notifications when the task flow gets stalled).