Winner of Digital Workplace Team of the Year 2023 – EY

DWG is pleased to announce that the 2023 winner of Digital Workplace Team of the Year is EY’s Digital Knowledge Platforms team, as revealed by DWG Director of Research, Elizabeth Marsh, during a special live awards event on September 5. 

Now in their seventh year, the awards are produced by DWG and celebrate organizations and practitioners that have excelled in creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments. Find out about previous winners in the awards Hall of Fame and our free report Celebrating the best digital workplaces: 5-year trends from DWG’s awards. 

New for 2023, the Digital Workplace Team of the Year award recognizes the outstanding teams in our industry that pioneer the digital workplace through exceptional teamwork and leadership, innovative and engaging approaches, and standout achievements and impact. Following the deliberations of our panel of independent judges, EY lifted the main award for delivering at scale on an ambitious vision for digital employee experience that makes a real difference to the organization. 

Commenting on this win during the awards episode, Elizabeth Marsh said: “EY’s Digital Knowledge Platforms team is of a very high calibre. With a human-centred approach at the core of its work, it has a clear and ambitious vision for employee digital experiences at EY that it’s delivering on to an exceptionally high standard. The team works closely and creatively together and with stakeholders, and is adept at demonstrating the value of its work to the business. It’s also an outward-looking team that consistently shares its knowledge with other practitioners in the digital workplace field.” 

Vision with purpose

EY’s Digital Knowledge Platforms team’s strategy is tightly aligned with the organization’s market development strategies. Its purpose is to “provide digital experiences that support knowledge-sharing to help EY win in the market”. These experiences include intranet products (such as its flagship digital experience, Discover), knowledge architecture and operations, as well as research, measurement and data-driven insights. In 2023, a significant delivery is its ‘Discover Reimagined’ project, involving a major iteration of Discover, including aspects such as personalized findability, comprehensive people profiles and bespoke knowledge tools for service lines – as well as upgrading the underlying technology. 

As one judge commented: “I’m very impressed with the well-thought out and well-structured strategy for this team […] it’s very apparent that this team is driven by strategic thinking.” 

The judging panel was also impressed with the team’s agility, pivoting plans for the Discover Reimagined project to fit in with shifting strategic priorities at an organizational level. 

With 66 team members across six countries, this team operates at a scale that many digital workplace teams can only dream about. Its competency-based approach provides clear areas of focus – for example, ‘Plan & Design’, ‘Build & Integrate’ and ‘Innovate’. Team members work to a set of expectations covering areas such as living the EY values, being inclusive, communicating clearly, challenging the status quo, and being stakeholder- and team-centred. Meeting objectives is carefully balanced with personal development needs, so that individuals are continually learning and growing. 

Customized digital experiences

A human-centred design approach drives the team’s work on customized digital experiences informed by in-depth user research. EY employees regularly engage with Discover development work, inputting at an early stage as well as road testing new concepts and user testing its latest capabilities. Continuous feedback loops provide vital input to the ongoing development of Discover and related products. 

Ideation at scale

Ideation challenges, known as ‘Ideathons’, are a regular part of the team’s process, soliciting creative input from the business via the ‘Cognistreamer’ platform to help develop the team’s thinking in key areas. A recent Ideathon focused on generative AI, with ideas evaluated, voted upon and prioritized for proof-of-concept development. Examples included using AI to help practitioners identify the right individual(s) for a particular need, and providing a conversational interface to connect practitioners with relevant documents and help them draft proposals based on pre-defined outlines. 

High impact stories

The team is also adept at demonstrating the value of its work to the wider business. As well as producing quarterly reports on its progress for EY leadership, the team creates and publicizes ‘high impact stories’ to recognize colleagues’ achievements and highlight significant areas of value which are contributing to the broader strategy. In a recent example, cutting-edge work on findability testing and tuning, including development of a ‘relevancy playbook’, has reduced the cycle time for search tuning ‘from days to minutes’.   

 
The Digital Workplace of the Year Awards, produced by DWG, celebrate those organizations and practitioners who have excelled at creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments. 

The awards provide the perfect opportunity for you and your organization to share your digital workplace achievements with peers and to gain global, industry recognition! 

The entry and judgement criteria for these awards are underpinned by the collective knowledge and experience of DWG research, benchmarking and expertise plus extensive industry insights. Nominations for the 2024 awards will open early 2024 – watch out on our website for more details. 

Find out more about the Digital Workplace Team of the Year award category: 

• Celebrating brilliant digital workplace teams – a new award from DWG! 
• What makes an award-winning digital workplace team? 

Categorised in: Digital workplace, Digital Workplace of the Year Awards, Metrics & measurement, Search & findability, Strategy & governance