Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Officer at Nexthink.
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If you asked someone five years ago what their office was like, they might have described an open-concept floor plan with a limited supply of conference rooms. And while this is still the case for some, today, many workers would describe their offices as their laptop screens, their conference rooms as Zoom and their watercooler conversations as Microsoft Teams.
Due to these changes, the attributes that drove prospective employees to companies, like the culture or location of the office, have changed too. Today, the onus is on IT departments to design our ideal digital workplaces, as the technology available to employees is now what makes or breaks an experience. That’s because for remote, hybrid and even in-office workers—technology is everything.
During this year’s Gartner Digital Workplace Summit, Brad Anderson, President of Products and Services at Qualtrics and Pedro Bados, CEO at my own company Nexthink sat down to discuss this new era of work, the challenges organizations are facing and actions businesses can take to ensure their workplace technology is a positive experience for employees.
In this article, I will break down two key pieces of advice for leaders seeking to optimize their workforce’s relationship to its technology.
1. The experience gap is a pressing concern.
About 90% of C-suite executives believe their company pays attention to employee needs when introducing new technology. Yet, only 53% of employees say the same. While we all know that technology experience is crucial to today’s workforce, there seems to be a major disconnect between what is being done and what needs to be done to ensure a positive digital employee experience.
In fact, according to a recent Qualtrics study, 7 out of 10 employees report feeling neutral or even dissatisfied with their tech experience. Considering the fact that 82% of senior IT decision makers say their digital workplace influences their willingness to recommend a company to job-seekers, this is having a major impact on recruitment and retention.
Many organizations are stuck in a traditional way of thinking in which IT dictates what solutions would be best for employees. But today, the roles have reversed. It is now IT’s role to understand employee needs and preferences before investing in new technology.
2. Communication is key to understanding where you’re lacking.
So, what can be done to combat this disconnect? The first and most obvious answer is to simply ask employees how their technology experience is going, what they need and how their organization can help with any unaddressed challenges.
Traditionally, IT has been a small part of yearly employee surveys. But at a moment in which organizations are taking the time to ask for direct feedback, there often isn’t room for the type of personalized, technology-specific prompts necessary to enact real change in IT.
By introducing continued surveying, specific to their digital and technology needs, employers can better track direct feedback about what is working for their team and what isn’t.
Surveying in the relevant moment is critical to getting as close to an accurate sentiment as you can. Consider the fact that Uber asks you about your ride as soon as you step out of the car, not two months after your trip. Why would you then wait to ask your employees about something as critical to their performance as their technical setup only once or twice a year? It’s then up to leadership to address that feedback in order to create an ideal digital workplace.
Yet surveying, while important, will only get you so far when used as the only means of gauging employee happiness and technology useability. As with anything, context is critical. For instance, employees might be saying they’re happy with their tech stack, but if only half the department is using a critical collaboration tool, the data can show us a very different story.
Where did adoption go wrong? Is onboarding missing a critical step? Is the tool not optimal in different OS environments? IT needs to play the role of the investigator to find out how to optimize the digital environment.
What is IT’s role in addressing employee frustrations?
A considerable number of employees (40%) and IT leaders (68%) report they experience at least one IT issue per week that prevents them from doing their job. In some instances, these issues can last longer than 30 minutes. This breach of workflow not only impacts an organization’s timeline for projects but has a lasting impact on employee happiness.
HR and IT leaders actually ranked poor tech service as the third most influential factor for employee turnover or burnout. In addition to getting feedback from employees, there also needs to be an overall shift in the mindset of IT. The reactive problem-solving that once defined the role has to evolve to a more proactive designer of the IT experience.
Now is the time to invest in your employees’ digital experience.
If you are not collecting the most precise insights when it comes to measuring the success of your employees’ digital experience, you could be wasting valuable time and money.
By understanding the different perspectives between employees and decision makers, creating two-way dialogue and gaining a contextual and holistic understanding of employee technology needs and taking action, organizations can create the ideal digital workplace that employees are happy to invest their time in—and that future recruits will seek out when looking for new opportunities.
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