Monthnote: January 2023

Tap, tap, tap… is this thing on?

In a spirit of working out loud, we’re going to share as much as we can about our journey developing, launching and running our new project, DWXS.

We’ll share what we’re learning from the data, so the rest of the digital workplace community can learn from it too. And we’re going to use these monthly updates to share what we’ve been up to.

So here goes.

Going public

We’ve been talking about doing this for at least a year, and working on it in stealth mode for the last six months. So we’re delighted (and more than a little relieved) to finally launch and share it with the world.

And there’s nothing like kicking off with a new client and launching a product on the same day to keep a little consultancy busy. Very much recommend this if you ever feel you’re getting too much sleep 😊

Over the past few months we’ve been working with a small group of organisations to test the Study, to refine our question set and develop our setup process. We’ve been iterating and learning as we go.

We wanted to keep the cost as low as we can, so teams can do the Study year after year and track their own progress. So we’ve worked to automate analysis and report production. This has meant learning more than we ever thought we’d know about PowerAutomate and Zapier. And last week we decided that done’s better than perfect, so we hit that launch button (well, we published our website).

That’s just the start of our journey. We want to keep improving the tool and our processes, and re-baseline our data so we can start offering benchmarking scores, so we’re opening up to Beta users so we can get more orgs into the study.

We’ve been overwhelmed by the response. Both the positive feedback and support from the digital workplace and intranet community, and the number of organisations who want to run it. We’re getting back to people as quickly as we can. Promise.

No code, no worries

One of the first decisions we needed to make was how to build and host the Study. We settled on building the employee-facing element in... Microsoft Forms.

IKR?!

An unfashionable but very deliberate choice; it’s estimated nine out of ten digital workplaces run on Microsoft, and the overwhelming majority of mid to large size firms - the size where you have a digital workplace - use Microsoft productivity tools. By running the study in the same, we remove barriers to organisations signing up.

We can run it our instance of M365, or we can share with clients to set it up in theirs. That means everyone can avoid weeks of information security approvals.

We believe it’s flexible enough to run in any enterprise survey tool but - just as our initial analysis suggested - we’re yet to work with an organisation that doesn’t want to run it in either their instance of M365 or ours.

(If that’s you - and you’d like to take a punt on running it in Google Workspace - then let’s chat)

Brand

We wanted DWXS to have a bold and distinctive brand that made it stand out in the digital workplace and consultancy space. So we turned to brand designer Eve Warren to create something that reflected what we want DWXS to be - simple, data-led, and all about the user experience.

After an initial briefing call, Eve asked a bunch of questions about our product, ambitions, expectations, and what brands we admired.

She came back with three different potential approaches. We ended up combining two of these into one which Eve dubbed “Statistically Beautiful”: Taking data and statistics and visualising them in riotously colourful and engaging visual identities.

The logo and patterns depict charts and data viz, and that’s paired with bold type and straight-talking messaging.

The colour palate is bold and distinctive, and Eve extended it so it can be used across our reports. So even our charts are banging.

We’re so happy with how it turned out, and believe this will help us to stand out in an often-staid industry

What’s next?

Our website launch coincided with our switch from closed Alpha to a broader and shorter Beta phase. So that’s our focus for the immediate term.

With the fundamentals ready, we want to build the dataset so that we can provide even better benchmarking. To make that work, we’re looking for partner organisations: you’ll get the DWXS and our time entirely for free and in return, we ask for your feedback on process and platform, so we can get better at what we do. If you’re keen to be in our beta group, get in touch quickly as places are limited.

It all starts with data

We’re firm believers in the numbers – facts are friendly, as a former colleague once said. So while your digital workplace journey starts with DWXS data (we hope!), we think our journey starts here too.

Our ambition is to build the world’s best source of digital workplace data and, later this year, will start sharing the stories we see in the numbers. What are the macro trends? What do we all need to keep our eyes on? We’ll share more about the evolution of DWXS in future monthnotes.