How to Measure Digital Workplace Enablement ROI

Measuring return on investment (ROI) is a fundamental component of any digital transformation initiative. It allows you to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate the value of your efforts to key stakeholders. It proves that your investments are helping the business grow and reach its goals.

However, measuring the ROI of your digital workplace enablement efforts can be daunting with so many variables at play.

While most organizations achieve less than one-third of the impact they expected from their digital investments, many fail to understand how they could have done things better and what specific actions to take to make things right due to the complexity of proofing their digital investment ROIs.

Why It’s So Hard to Measure Digital Workplace Enablement Efforts

It’s not for the lack of trying. The complexity of digital technologies and the varied ways employees use them make it difficult to quantify the impact of such initiatives.

Here are three challenges that organizations often face when attempting to measure their digital workplace ROI:

• Defining ROI

Unlike other business initiatives that are more tangible and straightforward, modern workplace transformation is often complex, and its benefits may not be as easily quantifiable and immediately apparent. This requires organizations to take a longer-term view of their investments before discovering their digital transformation progress.

• Quantifying Impact

Without the right tool, capturing the full impact of such initiatives on the organization can be difficult, especially in financial terms. Some metrics, such as decreased costs or increased revenue, can be directly linked to fiscal outcomes. Other metrics, such as improved collaboration or employee satisfaction, may be more difficult to quantify. This makes it even more challenging for organizations to justify ongoing investments in digital workplace enablement to key stakeholders.

• Collecting data

There may be analytics tools that can show how much time your workforce is using your new apps and platform. Still, they may not be comprehensive or granular enough to provide a complete picture of the ROI of your digital transformation efforts. For instance, some data may only be available on an organization-wide level, preventing organizations from assessing the impact of their initiatives per business region or department. Limitations like these can significantly affect business decisions and how organizations act for corrective measures.

Key Metrics for Measuring Digital Workplace ROI

Measuring your digital transformation ROI requires carefully considering the metrics most relevant to your organization’s goals. What are you hoping to achieve through your digital transformation efforts? Are you looking to increase productivity, reduce costs, or improve customer satisfaction?

Organizations have varying priorities and challenges and may require different metrics to measure their ROIs accurately.

However, if your goal is to enable a people-centric digital workplace, these three key metrics must be critical components of your digital transformation ROI:

1. Platform adoption/usage

Platform usage metrics determine how well your workforce adopts your new tools and processes. With these adoption metrics, you can see how successful your digital workplace investments are for both your organization’s and your users’ benefit. Is your new communication platform helping with their collaboration? Does your intranet help boost productivity by allowing users to find data more quickly?

Understanding platform adoption insights also helps you find more value in how well your workforce uses your platforms to do their jobs better. For instance, if your new communication platform and work processes help the sales team close deals faster, this may mean increased sales and revenue for the entire organization in the long run.

Discover how you can optimize your digital adoption by learning from Takeda’s journey:

2. User activity

User activities help provide insight into employees’ usage patterns, informing a more comprehensive assessment of essential factors such as productivity, employee engagement, collaboration, and more. This enables you to drill down further into your platform metrics to get granular reports per business unit, department, region, etc.

By gaining a clear understanding of how your users work and collaborate in your new modern workspace, you can develop training programs or implement solutions that better meet their needs and preferences. This can help your workforce collaborate more efficiently, communicate more effectively, and feel more engaged in their work. As a result, they can leverage the tools you provide to complete tasks faster and produce high-quality work, leading to improved overall business outcomes.

3. License insights

One of the biggest expenses in a digital workplace is the cost of licenses for various software tools and applications. By tracking license usage, organizations can gain a better understanding of how effectively they are using these tools and whether they are getting the most value out of their investments.

For example, license insights can help identify instances where employees are using only a fraction of a tool’s capabilities, indicating a potential need for additional training or support. Moreover, license insights can reveal situations where too many licenses are being purchased, leading to unnecessary expenses.

By analyzing license usage data, organizations can make informed decisions about where to allocate their resources. This can help them optimize their license usage, ensuring that they are paying only for what they need and avoiding wasteful spending. As a result, license tracking can help organizations achieve significant cost savings, ultimately increasing the ROI of their digital investments.

Reach your ROI from your digital transformation faster through this guide:

Unlock Your Digital Transformation Scorecard with tyGraph Pulse

To drive digital transformation success, gauge your progress and measure impact through data analytics. tyGraph Pulse provides organizations with accurate analytics for the three critical metrics mentioned above and more to get customized insights based on your organization’s specific needs and goals for a successful implementation of digital workplace enablement efforts.

tyGraph Pulse’s digital transformation scorecard provides a comprehensive view of organizations’ Microsoft 365 adoption insights and measures key metrics for digital transformation ROIs – adoption, user activity, licenses, and more. Then, it adds points for every successful implementation of the critical metrics to show your organization’s overall digital transformation progress:

Digital Transformation Adoption and Usage

Get an overview of how your tenant performs across Microsoft 365 workloads with combined reports on user activity and usage of your Microsoft platforms. Find out which sites are active and where users spend most of their time. You can also see your digital transformation trends monthly to gauge progress or decline in your adoption.

Digital Transformation Detail

tyGraph Pulse then allows you to further drill into the details by understanding the usage persona of various business areas.

You can get granular insights on your users’ activity per department, region, or country and even find out how well they collaborate across the Microsoft 365 platforms. You also have mobility insights to see what devices – whether mobile or desktop – your users primarily utilize to work and access information.

License enablement

Discover how to allocate license resources effectively with tyGraph Pulse’s license insights. Uncover total license trends and distribution and dig deeper into newly assigned, adopted, and non-adopted licenses. This allows you to reassign or forecast license procurement with ideas on trends and possible use of license allocations.

With accurate analytics and valuable insights, tyGraph Pulse gives organizations an overview of their digital transformation progress. It empowers you to make data-driven decisions to improve adoption and increase your digital workplace enablement ROI.

Ensure Digital Transformation Success with AvePoint

From migration to adoption, it’s essential to keep people at the center of your digital transformation. But to do things right and ensure success, you need tools that help you excel in modernizing – and measuring – your workplace.

Find out how AvePoint can help throughout your digital transformation journey. Explore AvePoint’s Digital Workplace Enablement solutions today.