Defining the digital workplace: a systematic literature review

Abstract

There have been a significant number of publications about digital workplace transformation. This is due to technological developments in the last decades as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is no adequate overall definition of the term. This leads to misunderstandings and confused interpretation of the digital workplace, sometimes even narrowing it down to a set of tools or a platform.

Given the complexity of digital workplace transformation, there is a need to have an integrated prospective and analyze it not just from a technological perspective, but from an organizational and processes point of view as well. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to review the concept and offer a comprehensive definition of the digital workplace. This includes all the important aspects of the transformation including tools and platforms as well as personal issues, organization, processes and management.

The paper provides a systematic literature review of the publications in leading bibliographic and citation bases, starting from Web of Science and Scopus to SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore and Association for Information Systems eLibrary. The review includes not only journal papers, but also leading proceedings, books and other referent publications. It addresses the authors’ approaches, perspectives, terminologies, focusses and understanding of workplace transformation over the last decade by a comprehensive review of the state of art of the literature in the field of digital workplace. Finally, a set of recommendations are made to further research in increasingly important subject of digital workplace transformation.