In my previous article, I explored the concept of digital workplace maturity as a consistent driver of business impact. Here, I’m going to explore what it means to reach digital workplace maturity, and more importantly, how to get there.
The digital workplace is now the norm. But despite this, we’re having ongoing problems with disconnected tools, consistent digital friction, sub-par employee experience, and IT reactivity.
These are sticky challenges to digital workplace maturity, and they’re expensive: Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy US$8.9T–that’s 9% of global GDP–every year.
This is why digital workplace maturity matters, and why it needs a practical roadmap.
Start with a baseline before setting a maturity target
A common mistake is to pursue digital transformation goals before establishing the operational baseline needed to support them. And that’s completely understandable, considering the considerable negative impact of staying still.
But the first thing needed to reach digital workplace maturity is to understand what you’re working with—your baseline. This means looking at your current situation and capabilities, and, from there, plotting realistic steps towards digital workplace maturity.
This is harder than it sounds. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of employees will acquire, modify, or create technology outside IT’s visibility, up from 41% in 2022. This sprawl means it’s getting increasingly difficult to understand what you’re working with.
Despite the difficulty, building this foundation is vital for achieving digital workplace maturity. And this has to look beyond deployment and uptime. It needs to reflect how work actually gets done, where friction shows up, and which gaps are really holding you back.
This roadmap follows the same logic. In it, digital workplace maturity is a progression rather than a switch. It means mastering the operational basics, first, before infusing your operations with experience data, and then finally reaching a product-centric operating model.
Starting with a strong foundation turns maturity from an abstract ambition into a practical roadmap.
Understand the journey: The three stages of digital workplace maturity
You don’t run before you can walk, right? Similarly, you don’t reach digital workplace maturity before ticking off certain developmental milestones.
Stage 1: Master the operational basics
It’s vital to start small. At this point, there's no talk of transformation or long-term vision; instead, focus on stabilizing the environment, reducing incident duration, and improving visibility across the IT environment.
All the while, build foundational management and security over endpoints. These are the operational basics that will set you up for consistent, sustainable success. Without them, there’s little point in talking about refining the digital workplace.
Stage 2: Infuse operations and experience data
Once you’ve mastered the basics, you’re ready to enhance your operations with experience data. Your goal here has moved past simply keeping things running. Now you’re thinking about how employees experience the digital workplace and how you can use this data to improve it.
In practice, this means layering sentiment and performance telemetry into operational workflows. This will help you to shift left: move from reactive support to proactive IT and automate fixes before they impact employees. This means you can focus on investment on real employee friction—where it matters most.
Stage 3: Adopt a product-centric mindset
Once you have the data and are using it to make decisions and prevent issues, it’s time for a shift in thinking. It’s time to start treating employee experience as the “product”.
By this, I mean start managing the digital workplace as an experience that should be designed with intention, measured, and improved over time.
In real terms, this means moving from managing systems to designing outcomes, aligning roadmap decisions to employee journeys; and, most importantly, integrating continuous improvement loops.
Digital maturity isn’t usually achieved by “more tools". Instead, it arises in the mindset shift that happens over this three-step process—moving from operational stability to experience-led improvement, and then to a more intentional, product-style approach to employee experience.
People: Build the organization around digital experience
Digital workplace maturity depends as much on people as on tools: specifically, on how organizations organize, lead, and listen. This is organizational maturity.
1. How you organize
Fragmented ownership often creates fragmented experiences. For this reason, it’s important to shift away from siloed ways of working. Teams such as EUC, service desk, and applications need to work in a more coordinated way. The aim is a cohesive all-in-one experience designed around shared employee journeys.
2. How you lead
As we've already seen, more tools don't necessarily result in a more mature digital workplace. And by extension, good leadership doesn’t mean simply introducing new tools. It means taking responsibility for how they shape employee experience and, by extension, business outcomes.
This involves making digital experience a leadership concern: elevating experience metrics to leadership dashboards and focusing on driving adoption, rather than just deploying tools. This requires a real mindset shift, one that puts digital employee experience at the very core of business priorities.
3. How you listen
A recent study by Gallup found that 20% of the world’s employees experience daily loneliness. When it comes to digital workplace maturity, this clearly has a huge impact—and yet it won’t ever appear in any dashboard.
Because of this, the last facet of organizational maturity depends on your ability to listen. This should involve some formal listening capacity that enables employees to share feedback, alongside sentiment data and behavioral analytics.
This listening can start small. The most important thing is to make employee perception measurable and actionable. If your leaders collect feedback and never communicate follow-up actions, it breaks employee trust quickly and permanently.
Process: Move from reactive support to predictive operations
When it comes to process, maturity means moving from reactive support to predictive operations. That starts with shifting left.
By this, I mean engineering for great experience up front, rather than waiting for incidents to surface and fixing them after the fact. But again, this doesn’t happen overnight.
First, we have reactive maturity. In this setup, IT responds to issues after they happen, so the goal should be to accelerate out of reactive IT as fast as possible by shortening incident duration, capturing knowledge from recurring issues, standardizing remediation steps, and highlighting trending issues. This stage reduces chaos, builds consistency, and creates the baseline data needed to improve.
Next, we reach proactive maturity. At this point, we automate remediation and use data and sentiment to spot and remove friction earlier. We’re also using experience data to inform IT investment and prevent ticket volume (e.g. performance-based device refresh).
Our last stop is predictive maturity. Now, we can anticipate issues before they happen, use AI-driven anomaly detection and pattern recognition across endpoints, and combine quantitative telemetry with employee interviews and design thinking workshops to make experience a key driver of business outcomes.
This is what we mean by shifting left: in a very holistic sense, reducing the friction that keeps interrupting productive work by designing systems that prevent it from happening in the first place.
Technology: Modernize the stack without increasing sprawl
When it comes to technology, maturity means modernization with discipline. The goal is to build a stack that is more connected, scalable, and easier to use—rather than simply adding more tools. Of course, IT leaders must ensure their modernization efforts align with business goals.
Look beyond SaaS to AI agents
Mature digital workplace teams are modernizing endpoint management, Desktop as a Service, remote support, and experience monitoring as part of a continued shift to SaaS. This has historically created more agility, better scalability, and faster innovation cycles—and should continue.
At the same time, AI agents are likely to disrupt the user interfaces of major SaaS apps and allow for greater orchestration. While full disruption is unlikely due to deeply embedded infrastructure with highly proprietary data, digital workplace leaders need to start experimenting with AI agents.
Consolidate where it makes sense
Okta’s 2025 Businesses at Work report found that security tools account for 40% of the fastest-growing apps, while the global average number of apps per customer has now passed 100. In this context, it makes sense to counteract tool sprawl and seek out unified solutions.
Use AI to strengthen operations
AI also has a role to play, but only for practical use cases that accelerate maturity. It can speed troubleshooting, support automated remediation, and improve anomaly detection today. The point is not to layer AI onto fragmentation, but to use it in ways that compound the data in your environment. As we move into the future, AI agents will become more autonomous through increased repetition, understanding, and learning, and pave the way for the autonomous digital workplace.
Integrate instead of replacing
And finally, mature technology strategies avoid rip-and-replace thinking. Instead, they integrate with existing ITSM, security, endpoint management, and collaboration tools to create a more coherent ecosystem over time. That is what technology maturity looks like in practice: not more complexity, but more coherence. AI agents will also ease orchestration challenges across these complex landscapes.
A mature stack should make the digital workplace easier to manage and easier to use.
How TeamViewer ONE enables digital workplace maturity
TeamViewer ONE helps bring maturity into practice across people, process, and technology. It reduces silos by giving teams shared visibility and a more unified view of the digital workplace. That matters because maturity depends on ownership, not just oversight.
It also supports the shift from reactive support to proactive and predictive operations. With automation and AI embedded into workflows, teams can resolve issues faster, prevent more friction before impact, and make better decisions based on a connected view of the environment.
And at the platform level, TeamViewer ONE brings together remote connectivity, DEX, AI-powered insights, and endpoint management in a SaaS-native, platform-based architecture.
Across it all, the goal is to create a more connected foundation for a digital workplace that is intentional, experience-driven, and built to improve over time. This will lay the groundwork for truly autonomous digital workplaces, starting with autonomous endpoint management (AEM).
Conclusion: Maturity is a capability you build over time
If you take one message from this article, it’s that digital workplace maturity is a capability, and it happens over time.
Crucially, organizations that invest in strengthening this capability can innovate faster, retain talent, operate more securely, and drive measurable business outcomes.
And this happens, in effect, by focusing on employee experience and—by making smarter technology decisions—supporting all of us to do our best work.
The digital workplace may now be the norm, but maturity is what turns it into a source of resilience, performance, and business value.
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