Pew Research reports that 54% of employed adults want to work from home after the global pandemic ends, compared to just 20% who worked from home...
Pew Research reports that 54% of employed adults want to work from home after the global pandemic ends, compared to just 20% who worked from home before the coronavirus outbreak.
Research by the professional network Blind found that 64% of the respondents would forgo a $30,000 raise in exchange for a permanent work-from-home arrangement.
As a result, IT organizations are challenged to support today’s workforce with tools that equip employees to work from anywhere while erasing barriers of time and space and supporting the organizational culture. IT must not only provide employees with computing, network, and software resources to empower the distributed and digital workforce but it must also provide support, protect critical data, and ensure that virtual teams can work productively. In this new paradigm, the employee is at the center of the hybrid workplace. Motivated, happy employees demonstrably improve the customer experience. In a recent IDC survey1, 85% of the respondents said that a better employee experience and higher employee engagement translate to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and higher revenues for their organization. “It used to be that everything was funneled through email. That’s been transformed into a multichannel environment where employees choose what channels they want to use to engage across the organization. The challenge many organizations face is ensuring that this new environment is seamless and delivers a great experience for the employees and enhances collaboration and organizational culture, not hold it back,” says Dan Perlick, vice president, Digital Workplace Global Practice at Kyndryl. “If the solution is not a positive experience, the engagement won’t be there.”
The new digital workplace requires a data-driven approach to seamlessly integrate applications and data, simplify workflows, and enhance the employee experience. Changes forced on organizations by the pandemic present an opportunity for them to rethink the way work is done. “There’s no better time to implement automation than right now,” Perlick says. “You can’t be scared of it. The ones that are implementing automation are seeing a payoff in employee experience and productivity across the business.” Each touchpoint2 — including procurement, devices, applications, management, and support — must be integrated into a seamless and secure whole. The experience for the remote worker needs to be as transparent as that of the office employee. IDC refers to this as “experience parity,” which it defines as “a comparable employee experience for a hybrid workforce that ensures that all workers securely interact with corporate resources (including people) with a consistent experience and context across locations.” IDC research shows that many organizations are already making investments to support this new reality: “Nearly half the companies surveyed by IDC indicated that their hybrid work technologies, policies, and processes were ‘in progress’ with most key resources available to remote employees with some lingering access or user experience issues.” “Investment in digital and work transformation technologies aligns with organizational imperatives around improved business resilience and increased employee productivity,” notes Amy Loomis, research director, IDC Future of Work. “We are also tracking a direct correlation between spending levels with stronger momentum toward achieving experience parity for hybrid workers while lower spending levels aligned with more limited or ad hoc approaches.”
1 IDC blog, "Employee Experience and Customer Experience – What is the Connection?," September 17, 2021 2 IDC, "IDC Future of Work Survey Data Shows That Hybrid Work Models Are Still Evolving Amid Ongoing Uncertainty and Efforts to Achieve Employee Experience Parity," IDC #prUS48252521, Sept 21, 2021
IDG Communications, Inc.