3. Guide to effective strategic planning for 2025

As we approach 2025, strategic planning has never been more vital. The year ahead promises both challenges and opportunities, demanding that organizations prepare with clarity and purpose. Effective strategic planning ensures you can anticipate change, set meaningful priorities, and align your efforts to drive success in a rapidly evolving landscape.

This guide is designed to help you plan for the year ahead by grounding your strategy in three essential steps: baselining your current state, designing a compelling vision, and developing a practical roadmap. With these tools, you'll be ready to seize the opportunities that 2025 brings.

1. Baseline your current state

The DWG ‘Baseline to Breakthrough’ approach emphasizes the importance of baseline measurement. Baselining helps you gain critical insights into where your organization stands in the digital workplace landscape. It is a crucial first step that will give you meaningful, verifiable data that will secure the ongoing success of your digital workplace.

Baselining can involve:

• Evaluating your existing digital tools and processes.
• Identifying gaps in your current strategy.
• Comparing your progress against industry peers.

By establishing a solid baseline, you can make informed decisions, set realistic goals and drive continuous improvement. There are several elements to establishing the baseline. These can include:

Auditing your current technology stack: Identify gaps, streamline tools and ensure that the digital workplace is well-equipped for future demands. Many organizations may discover that they have multiple tools in use for the same purposes, leading to confusion and inefficiency.

Identifying key metrics: Focus on metrics such as employee experience, tool fragmentation and engagement levels. These metrics provide a comprehensive view of the effectiveness of the digital workplace.

Surveying your user base: Conduct user research to understand the employee experience and what their hopes, aspirations and frustrations are with the digital workplace.

Use a benchmarking tool or service: To measure against best practices and industry standards.

DWG has been carrying out benchmarks of intranets and digital workplaces with large organizations for over 20 years. Our benchmarks are an effective and efficient tool for organizations looking to understand how they are performing in areas such as digital workplace management, digital communications channels, digital collaboration tools, modern intranet management, and more.

Interested? Try DWG’s free diagnostic benchmarking tool

2. Design your vision

Envisioning helps you to see the ‘art of the possible’ as you imagine your future digital workplace, by exploring emerging trends and technologies that will shape the future of work, such as:

• AI-powered productivity enhancements.
• Advanced collaboration tools for hybrid teams.
• Personalized employee experiences driven by data analytics.

The DWG approach to envisioning is informed by its depth of experience, knowledge and research. Having understood your current state through baselining exercises, this is then combined with envisioning what is possible to inform the direction of your digital workplace team and digital HQ. This approach will help you to articulate a clear vision, developing and striving towards your ideal digital workplace.

DWG’s member organizations benefit from sharing their experiences and knowledge in a confidential and trusted space. As a DWG member organization, you will gain invaluable insights into how comparable teams are developing and managing their digital workplaces and intranets.

Find out more about DWG Membership services

3. Develop the roadmap

Roadmapping helps you to develop a clear action plan for the path ahead, rooted in your objectives. Nancy Goebel, DWG's CEO, emphasizes that without a clear purpose and approach, i.e. a roadmap, organizations risk becoming 'chaos coordinators' rather than strategic leaders.

As part of the roadmapping process, you should:

• Set achievable milestones for technology adoption.
• Develop strategies for change management and employee engagement.
• Align your digital workplace with broader business goals.