Be Digital By Digital - Campuses of future

We are in a mission to improve employee experience and embrace digital by digital. Last week was quite interesting to be part of an Ideathon where a set of millennials tried to shape the digital campus of future. I was representing DX - Digital Experience unit as one of the judges along with Anand and Preet coordinated by Indika. Anand has wider experience in digital employee experience and is one of the pioneers of industry in this space. Preet is a senior HR leader who has a great holistic view of employee work life engagements with years of experience. We were bringing multiple dimensions in shaping the future of workforce. The ideas that came up were quite interesting, touching the critical aspects of a live enterprise where the experience of the employees can be significantly elevated.

20 teams, approximately 80 friends did elaborate surveys and interviews of co workers to get a deeper view of the pain points in the massive campus and interestingly we also became party to crafting the solutions.

Quality of life is the essential aspect that improves employee experience, the key element of that is to eliminate employee touchpoints that has elements of friction. A scaled ecosystem has a fundamental challenge of queues around parking, food courts, employee service desks, employee stationary supplies, transportation etc. Elaborate solutions were discussed around addressing these challenges using phygital approaches. The central theme discussed was to continue efforts on a connected ecosystem, behaviour learning and optimization, outcome predictions etc. All of these have a larger potential to address the scale and convenience.

Efficient space utilisation, smart toilets, indoor and outdoor navigation, building management systems etc was one set of thoughts which enabled green IT as well as productivity. A wide variety of access modernization with facial recognition to wide usage of QR codes to provide unified access to facilities were discussed and debated.

Employee health was an amazing dimension that we could discuss, connecting health wearables, health data from phone to medical assistance to gym recipes, community creation and even diet recommendations with a holistic approach became a very interesting and novel proposition.

We respect our guests and visitors, creating a brand boosting experience. Covering all aspects of the campus and facilities were a great step towards contributing to our brand and what our guests experience. Connected ecosystems for new employee on boarding taking advantage of the complete digitization is a good way to start the digital journey in campus.

Extreme radical thinking like DeepFake to convey messages as videos mixing personalities of leaders and the rendering employee was quite novel and futuristic.

Campuses of future definitely needs one stop shop application experience with connected ecosystems. The campuses will be continuously learning the experience of employees, resources consumed and optimizing the ecosystems involved. A simplified self service model and feedback mechanism makes the engagement effective and meaningful. Community building and contributing to the brand internally and externally and enabling the communities create more transparent ways to connect with the employees. Integrating the various successful market models , B2B , ( outside campus, the ones in our day to day life ) in conveyance, concierges, wellness, catering, shopping etc into the campus is a short cut to increase digital adoption velocity. The future is, one world one experience and employee experience naturally soaks into personal experience. We are determined to continue the exercise and experiments to build a better tomorrow....

~AKP

15/09/2019