[WEBINAR] The Role of Digital Workplace Technologies in the Future of Work

hello everybody and welcome to this edition of the 451 alliance webinar series today's presentation covers workforce productivity and collaboration or wpc as it's known uh the webinar is entitled understanding it's goals and the role of digital workplace technologies in the new future of work my name is andrew crenin i'm a membership manager for the 451 alliance and i want to first sincerely thank you for attending today's presentation it's the participation of you our alliance members in our quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews that provides the rich end user insights that lay the foundation for the knowledge we're able to deliver to you through our reporting and our webinars and presenting today is mr chris marsh chris is the research director for the wpc practice here at 451 research he's based in san francisco good morning chris great to have you with us and take it away great thanks andrew and hello everyone thank you for your time today just to sort of re-emphasize echo andrew's point that you know we're all very thankful for your participation in our surveys i know all analysts here think the same and of course will be using much of that data today in the presentation so you know pretty self-explanatory per the the title for this session what we'll be talking about we'll really be talking about you know it's changing role in the digital workplace how they manage the digital workplace how they think and strategize around it we have a whole bunch of things going on you know the combination of ongoing digital transformations impacts from the pandemic you know crises in supply chains energy prices the cost of living along with sort of generally longitudinally rising expectations from employees around what their experience at work is like and you put all of that together it's really radically altering i think how technologists need to think about how they equip their workforces with you know not just technologies but policies and practices and and you know best practices that can shape how they get their work done um you know we see things like workforce alignment business resilience talent management skills mobility culture engagement all of these things now feel more important than even a few years ago and so that you know this webinar will explore these shifts it will point to some of the things to consider um as you know organizations try and align their business and technology transformations the intention here is it's not death by powerpoint i think i only have eight or nine slides that i'm going to go over and i'm going to try and go over them fairly quickly so that we have time for q a so again to to andrew's point if you have questions as we're going through this uh please feel free to submit them through the console and we'll try and get to them and if i if we can't get to them uh in this session either for time reasons or because i'm not the particular subject matter expert to answer your question then we'll make sure that someone in my team or or another team can follow up after the fact so let's um sort of let's get into this conversation then i mean i think maybe the most macro point i'll be making through this session is really that optimizing the digital workplace is about more than just managing productivity and collaboration tools it's more than just you know managing core business systems i think it has to be viewed and increasingly is being viewed certainly by the more digitally progressive organizations in a much wider lens of the employee experience or the ex which is what i'm showing here um there are different ways to think about the ex what it's constituted by uh in our conception of it it has these four pillars that you can see on the visual it has you know everything company values the sort of brand appeal and the day-to-day company culture and i'll be talking a little bit more about distinctions between you know company culture and operational culture later on and then there's the sort of second pillar of personal development skilling career potential the degree to which employees think that they can advance their career and their organization and then you have the sort of third pillar of everything compensation benefits and recognition and then finally you have what we call the work execution culture which is really the you know the tools the systems the practices the behaviors that determine how work is actually done how it's executed uh across teams across divisions within a company and you know we very purposefully place that work execution culture at the heart of the employee experience that's why we have it in the in the middle of the other pillars um you know more of the employee experience is really being mediated by technology and it has consequent impacts not just on productivity but on a whole host of other business outcomes as i'm sure you're experiencing and having conversations around within your own organizations so many of those outcomes are very hot button issues right now talent attraction talent retention skills mobility business agility business resilience innovation even purpose you know to what degree is it important to have a certain technology experience within a certain employee experience that can help shape either the purpose of the organization itself or the purpose that individual employees feel as they undertake their role as they go about their day-to-day work and so you know managing the digital workplace i think is increasingly a matter of managing the employee experience and with it we're certainly seeing closer collaborations i mean you're telling us this through the surveys that we do you know closer collaborations between i.t and hr and operations teams that they're happening and also with other lines of business maybe a more tangible going conversation with business leaders to understand you know what what are the specifics of of their teams what they need how they need to work and how you can equip them in being successful and and really here's some evidence to substantiate why taking an employee experience lens is important and this is actually taken from a regression analysis we did on the data from one of our employee surveys so we run a dedicated employee engagement survey at the end of every year this is data from the last time we did this in sort of december january this year where we really dig deep into the different drivers and barriers to engagement like what makes an engaged employee what do they think is important what what is an impediment to them feeling more content and engaged in their role it's a super interesting survey and you know we have a whole bunch of different questions that go in that survey and and variables that we look at and we decided the last time we did this you know you know how can we sort of cut through the noise as it were and actually try and distinguish what is really driving positive engagement and so from around 50 different variables the seven that i'm showing here came out as statistically significant drivers it's like the top drivers of positive engagement we could do and i have done whole webinars just on this data but but obviously the second and the seventh i think should be of particular interest right so the the first so strongest driver is you know there are opportunities for me to grow at work you know employees want to think that where they are gives them an opportunity to pick up new skills to advance their careers to get their promotions to see a future there but second place is you know my organization provides me with the tools and technologies that i need to succeed right so again just to re-emphasize that um the tools and technologies you equip your employees with are some of the most statistically strong drivers of your workforce's overall engagement and you'll note that even though it was a variable that we included in this survey compensation isn't here it just fell off just off the bottom of this list so if we look at this you know it's it's you know opportunity i want to know that there's opportunity where i work it's belonging and purpose i want to know that you know the organization i work for is an organization i respect i want to feel some sense of some sense of belonging here that can differ very differently employee by employee but you know increasingly employees want a sense of belonging and purpose and it's most certainly about technologies it's increasingly the case that the technology experience within an organization determines you know to a large part engagement and lots of lots of those other business outcomes that flow from either positive or negative engagement um we're seeing you know really interesting data uh amongst our employee surveys along the lines of uh you know if there was a much better technology stack um that was available in another company then you know a significant proportion i think it's about a third of all employees say that they would they would leave their current organization and work somewhere else if it was deemed that there were better technologies deployed across the workforce in that new organization that would give them a more satisfying less friction full day-to-day experience so this is highly consequential it's becoming more so and i think it really raises the significance and the stakes of your digital workplace technology strategies and then think increasingly leadership will expect these new outcomes again this is something that you're telling us in the surveys uh leadership wants that conversation and they want to have a better sense of cause and effect between you know investments you might be making in technologies you deploy to your employees and business outcomes that they might want to expect and i think increasingly we're seeing the urgency around those conversations and you know some sense of accountability um uh wanting to be had around um you know how those investments can directly lead to specific business outcomes that maybe haven't traditionally and and still for a lot of companies aren't we're really felt to be within the remit of it teams and digital workplace teams so you know technology is a driver of engagement and you know engagement impacts a whole host of important things which is really what we see here belonging was another of those key drivers if you remember from that previous slide more engaged employees are unsurprisingly five times more likely to feel a strong sense of belonging in their organization than those feeling disengaged they're even you know twice as likely as those feeling somewhat engaged to have a sense of belonging or feel a sense of purpose in their role employees who feel very engaged are more likely to be invested in their own career development in their organization they're more likely to be thinking about what opportunities they want to seize to progress in their career they're also more likely to feel a sense of purpose to be learning new skills and learning new skills more quickly they are less likely to be tempted to leave their current organization by the opportunity of a salary salary increase at another organization if they're feeling very engaged and so you know technology experiences obviously don't account for all of what drives that engagement amongst that sort of highest cohort of engaged workers but as we saw on the previous slide it is a huge determinant it is that second strongest driver overall of positive engagement um leadership are starting to want to understand that relationship much more so much more granular and much more tangibly than has historically been the case in most companies and you know there therefore needs to be you know intentional cause and effect stretching out from the specific investments you're making in digital workplace technologies um and uh you know other outcomes that are driven uh other outcomes that are sort of encapsulating um you know positive engagement drivers amongst amongst your employees and so i would say for some uh digital workplace teams this means that they need to raise their gaze a little uh the range and weight of business drivers behind technology choices is growing and for many uh digital workplace teams you know more strategic more intentional and more concerted thought will need to be put behind this now of course you know this is you are not a homogeneous group we know that clearly from surveys and all the data we analyze that you give us um you know there are digital leaders who are quite a far ahead in that journey who are technology progressive who are paying much more attention in their strategy and execution to um you know business drivers and intended business outcomes there are you know the other end those that are you know slower on this digital transformation curve and you know who haven't prioritized workforce transformation as as much as some other companies have done so you know it's a it's a challenging environment we all know this there's lots of um you know there's lots of sort of impediments to uh increasing productivity and efficiency and engagement across a company we all know this after two and a half turbulent years in particular but in fact before the pandemic it was also the case as you know companies were trying to figure out their digital transformations where workforce transformation fits in with that and what manner it should take in fact you know really interestingly and i often talk about this um in in webinars about three or four years before 2020 we saw blip on the radar again from data that you've been giving us that we've been tracking longitudinally improving the workforce productivity collaboration experience had risen up the i.t led transformation agenda within organizations prior to that it languished sort of bottom table mid table but but around 2016 2017 we really saw this rise up the agenda and i think it was because you know increasingly there was the feeling that you know there was too much friction around a growing number of application silos that was actually summing up into real problems with strategic execution um teams were not able to create workflows that they need to there was too much noise too much context switching all of those things that i think most of us are familiar with um and so you know for a good you know five six seven years it is sort of in the general sense begun to be prioritized much more as a transformation priority but of course we do have this pretty unique context that subsequently happened over the past couple of years and you know lots of challenges that exist out there which is what this this visual is showing i think our data points to a definitely a more remote slash hybrid future in terms of where employees are working that debate continues to rage i think actually in particular over the past couple of months it's sort of come back on the agenda as we phase out of the pandemic and as you know companies having to decide on what that longer term policy is around in office work or hybrid or remote certainly the preference that we see from employees in our employee surveys from the majority of employees is that they want you know a mix they don't want to be on site as much as they used to be doing before the pandemic and i think more companies have become permissive to it that's certainly what the data shows but obviously with that come a whole host of challenges we know that again looking at the data that you give us through our surveys you know business technologists are concerned with how to support work-life balances how to prevent burnouts how to ensure that teams can be focused and aligned a third are specifically worried about having the right technologies to support remote work that's what you've been telling us and about a quarter of you say that getting buy-in for a strategy to address it is also a a key challenge i would argue that that all of these challenges um can have technology answers to them that can help mitigate um the downsides uh it's certainly important to understand this context though um again before 2020 i i think work was uh pretty challenging lots of friction you know growing thumbs of application silos maybe not as much strategic thoughts beyond specific technology choices about what the operational culture again as distinct from company culture looks like what an optimally performing workforce can look like and what role digital workplace technologies play in wider employee experience strategies i think the difference from two years ago however is that the stakes are higher the relationship between employer and employees changing the pendulum always swings one way than the other but i think it's difficult not to see in the in the longer term view the pendulum not swinging towards employees um their expectations are rising and the labor market is still it is more volatile now than it was expectations around technology experiences are ever increasing of of course informed by what personal lives and you know more rests on getting this right than did in the past and so in short i think it should be the key transformation priority to get this right and i'd say there are really three main areas to focus on and we'll look at each of these over these last uh three slides before we segue into q a so the first area i would say you know and again you know we could spend whole webinars talking about each of these individual issues trying here to give a sort of more macro perspective around what what are those big buckets of challenges that we see impacting those making decisions around digital workplace strategies i think the first area really is addressing the very fragmented disconnected sprawling experience that most employees have across the different applications they need to use for many organizations this estate of different apps continues to grow and you know as you can see by the call out text box on the right and this is data from our employee survey two-thirds of employees state that among the biggest technology challenges that's impeding their own personal performance are you know struggles with fragmentation essentially it's information silos data silos the lack of integration between applications it's you know challenges in collaborating across applications with different people it's having too many niche apps that don't do enough really of what employees want them to do so they're having to try and string together you know um a sort of whole ecosystem of different applications and i'll provide a bit of a macro perspective here to begin to think about how to address this i mean we came to the conclusion i would say a couple of years ago that really we've come to the end of the first era of sas we've had 20 years of success and you know that era was one where pretty remorselessly the debate was you know a best-of-breed one focused on functional distinctiveness right the sort of general view was that you choose your best messaging app the best content collaboration app the best intranet the best project management tool etc and the iut's job was to sort of you know choose the best version of what they thought was the best version and connect them all through apis if there was demand to do that you know or not and let employees figure it out and that worked only to an extent it left us with you know lots of silence and all of the friction that has forced companies to take this as more of a transformation priority actually fixing it and i think we've detected over the past couple of years that we're really we're entering a second era for sass we spend a lot of our time of course speaking to technology vendors we spend i would say most of our time speaking to you know vendors are offering different solutions trying to understand you know what their positioning to what they see as the opportunity and obviously having an interesting conversation around that and you know increasingly seeing you know positioning marked more by the integration of different capabilities into more singular kinds of experience where it will need to make more intentional and strategic judgment calls on you know which apps are strategic which are tactical right which is the hub which are the spokes what does that ecosystem around um you know the sort of work destinations looks like what does the experience look like across those technologies and you know three things i think need to be balanced as um you know as you try and architect that state to provide that more seamless experience for the employees and these these three these three things the secret source of course is to keep them in balance so the first one is you know giving your workforce um the technologies that provide or support the maximum operational agility right so agility in terms of how data and information can move across your teams through your apps how your teams can plan their work um agility in terms of process creation and process management and also in terms of like resource management capacity planning i think the second thing is you know technologies that provide the maximum autonomy to more people to do those things right so how do you democratize you know things like process creation is that lower no code how do you do that around you know project planning and resource management is that they some kind of work management technology that is you know maybe more flexible and scalable than some of the traditional ppm kinds of tooling um there could be you know lots of different uh ways and perspectives in terms of how you judge you know empowerment of teams at the edge of the company uh with hot with the ability to do higher order kinds of things and then finally you know tools that allow your teams to stay aligned because no one wants a wild west that's been a big concern of companies as they've looked at some of these sort of land and expand tools um how do you make sure this alignment you know across teams where that needs to be the case certainly back to goals to compliance to governance frameworks to security requirements um you know no one wants that wild west but they do want focus and alignment so really you know as you think about how to grapple with this this application sprawl and all the friction that comes with that i would say try and you know think about your technology investments your technology strategy with those three things in mind how do you get the best balance between optimal operational agility between autonomy for your employees to do things in their tools and alignment so that you know that that is not going to create that autonomy is not going to create problems further down the line i think expecting those things to naturally happen you know it won't they won't either be the product of individual technology choices expecting them to happen when you're thinking features and function more so than experience i think is not going to end well either we are in it in an experience economy for customers we're used to thinking in that way maybe less so for the workforce and employees but it is increasingly so and you know experiences of course are more than just an aggregate of individual technology choices there needs to be a strategic architecture with the vision of that seamless experience that employees baked into it and so the second of these three big areas that you know as you reflect on your strategies it may be worth thinking about it's really the gap between strategy and execution that you know in most organizations exists very strongly um you know a company sets out with a set of goals expects those to cascade downwards into business teams and end up in a line delivery at the kind of localized level of course that frequently doesn't happen that's stating the obvious the past 20 years of sas has made that very challenging the more silos you have the more falls between the gaps the harder visibility and alignment are the more challenging focuses and the sas rule has ended up a little a little bit like chinese whispers you know one thing you said at the start and then it's interpreted or ends up being executed on very differently at the end of course none of this is knocking sass the sass era it's of course been a huge net benefit uh but i think we do need to be realistic about the balance of pros and cons so that you know strategies can be more realistic going forward and you know as you can see on on this with this data there are plenty of things that you're telling us that stifle sort of strategic planning some are related to actual you know strategy formation uh the creation of plans in the first instance some of them though are problems of execution i think all are a product arguably of a lack of real time tracking real-time decision making the lack of a base in data on which to make decisions and this is part of the reason why coming out of the pandemic we're seeing tailwinds behind and a sort of resurgence behind top-down approaches of course a lot of the the sas era has certainly in a productivity and collaboration employee engagement technology sense has been more of a bottoms-up movement but i think tailwind's coming out of the pandemic behind some top-down approaches so we see more interest in things like strategic portfolio management we see new spins around enterprise architecture we see uh you know really strong tailwinds behind more agile and connected planning where you know you have finance fpa teams and strategic planning teams in a closer exchange and near a real-time exchange with business teams it's also why we see more companies want a direct line of sight in their workflows and how they think about their their estate of workflows and business processes and with their goal setting and data from strategic goals to be more localized execution and you know business agility resilience all of those things that have been companies have had a you know shock around the past couple years really rely on closing this between strategy and execution and so there's a whole bunch of questions here if you have a pmo is it working is it agile engaging business teams or is it more of an ivory tower folio level capabilities how good are you at engaging and creating and sustaining ongoing conversations between technical teams business owners service owners how much visibility do you have into your overall architecture of tools not just from a cost standpoint but from a value stream angle and plenty of other questions to go into that mix but i think as we move forward over the next three years and and beyond uh we're going to see increasing focus from um you know i t and from digital workplace teams on figuring out you know what are the levers we want to pull here to actually close this gap so that we have more predictability in terms of um you know what is actually executed against visually the plans that we put in place previously then i would say that the final main challenge that that you know you need to think about is really data this is hitting workforce transformations later than it has done customer experience transformations where there is significantly more maturity around you know data management analytics and intelligence as part of the the cx technology stack nevertheless it's coming as it's almost the driver and the result of addressing the previous two challenges but more seamless experiences require a better appreciation of how data and information flows across applications across teams but seamless experiences also should themselves create higher quality data to use more unified data more contextualized data equally how companies close that gap between strategy and execution and their success in doing so will be because they're figured out largely will be because they're figuring out how data flows across their teams across their different systems so they will cause an effect in terms of you know how they continue to close that gap and get the outcomes that they they're intending towards um as the data in this visual shows that the most significant benefit from being more data driven is deemed to be improving business agility business processes 41 say it's the ability to empty decision makers right so this is data from the surveys that you've helped us with on the data analytics data management side uh really interestingly from our employees of age when we specifically asked them about their interest in having uh workforce analytics at their disposal or having more of their work informed by you know data based analytics the interesting news is that the level of comfort with their organization monitoring their activities on work provision devices and work apps if it was to improve if it was to recommend productivity improvements is actually pretty high so this is one of the questions we ask employees um 52 actually 53 percent say they're very comfortable with their company doing that say they're somewhat comfortable with them doing that so you put those two things together you've basically got 85 of employees who say i'm okay if you monitor what i'm doing on on work devices and apps you know if the goal is to recommend improvements to how my team operates how i can be more personally productive um it's only 15 who say i don't really want you to be doing that we then in the employee survey dig into okay so if you had that kind of analytics you know what would be the top use cases for you uh when it comes to you know improving your own personal performance and basically what they say is you know number one having more insights into top performing employees you know what are their skills what are their experience what can i learn from that number two is you know can you tell me more about how much time i'm spending on different tasks not always clear to me you know where i'm putting the weight of my time i need to be more efficient in understanding that so that i can you know rebalance if that's required and then the third main use case where employees say i would love more you know more of a database way to understand this is performance against goals right so give me the actual basis to understand where i am vis-a-vis goals how i'm performing and of course they want to know that in order to make changes to improve so i would say this is a fairly new frontier it's one that will become more important though to be more opinionated about so hopefully that was some useful food for thought um again you know any one of those issues we could have talked for for a whole separate hour about it but hopefully that gives you sort of like a a a sort of macro perspective around you know what you're telling us through the surveys what our employee respondents are telling us through the employee surveys um there's so much more we could have said we have four analysts just in my team and we have four separate primary surveys that we actually do amongst employees amongst yourselves amongst hr professionals amongst company leadership and that really allows us to understand this space but if you have any questions now please feel free to ask them and again if it's a question that's not my particular subject matter expertise we'll of course root it to one uh who can answer it to get back to you after the fact but andrew maybe you want to open up this q a let me know if anything's coming through yeah thank you chris for those great wpc insights really really great stuff so we do have some time and some questions to field uh here is the first chris an audience member asks is there an ideal tenure at an at an organization do we need to strive to retain employees for say four or eight years and then cycle in new employees to ensure new innovative thinking and keep the organization fresh and i am immediately recalling some data in some of our um some of our different surveys i mean i don't think there is an ideal tenure at an organization and of course it's going to depend on the type of organization the type of role also you know the demographics of particular employees how old they are how young they are what skills they have what kind of role they're performing so i wouldn't say there's an ideal tenure i do though think that you know companies at the moment are particularly concerned about attrition right they're coming out of the pandemic having experienced a lot of operational volatility the water talent in some ways has intensified and you know companies are really concerned about you know getting you know retaining employees retaining top talent having the processes that allow them to do that and you know one of the one of the things that i think they're as as part of that particularly focused on and we see this through our hr surveys and through some of the surveys we do amongst company leadership is you know getting employees off to a good start we have a really interesting question in our employee surveys where we ask both sort of recent hires so those in our surveys who are recent hires into whatever company they work for and amongst managers that basically ask them how quick they think it takes them to start delivering value in their role and i think the average is something like six months or the median life between i think um six months and and sort of nine months which is you know quite a long time and there is a definite strong correlation between the amount of time it takes someone to deliver value and how long they are retained in their role before they move on to do something else in a different organization i.e if you get off the

ground running really quickly and you have onboarding processes and technologies that support a really good onboarding of a new employee then you can actually trace that longitudinally to higher longer attention further down the line so you know as companies think about that they're really focused a lot at the moment on that you know getting their new employees off to a good start um we also see just coming out of the pandemic a big focus on skilling right there's lots more talk than there used to be sort of five six years ago around internal mobility right if we can't go out and find new employees as easily or it's really expensive for us to do that um then we need to have a strategy that allows us to you know continually skill our workforce and you know allow more internal mobility within the organization so that people can move around roles rather than just saying well as a company we don't allow that so the only option for someone who isn't satisfied in their role is to leave the organization so so i don't think there is an ideal tenure um but we certainly know that it's a much bigger more strategic issue for companies to retain talent at the moment um and again that's another reason why they need to take more of an employee experience and employ life cycle lens to their technology strategies because understanding the friction the pain points at each stages of an employee's journey is obviously going to give you a better chance of retaining talent where you want to that's great thank you um there is a another question that makes reference to a particular slide that i have brought back up it's slide number four the question reads uh slide four seems to imply that employees want stability at the work environment and that they want an environment where they can stay for some time but this seems to be counter to the the current employee movements out of organizations can you comment on that what are your thoughts here um i mean i think employees want you know increasingly they want to feel a sense of belonging and purpose if they don't you know if you're a talented member of the workforce and you're not getting those things then you will leave but i think what we do see amongst companies who really do prioritize that who um you know work hard on you know providing a good experience for their employees um that you know an organization in which there is you know mechanisms to drive engagement and create a sense of belonging and allow employees to develop their own sense of purpose within that organization which of course is going to differ employed by employee then they do have stronger attention so you know again interestingly on this data compensation of course is a big part of the mix for all employees for certainly for most employees and that goes without saying but it did drop off the bottom of this list so you know insofar as the interpretation of this data can say you know employees really do want a sense of belonging a sense of connectiveness with their company and they want they don't just want a day job um where they clock in and clock out then then yes i think that is a it's something that is trending upwards but again you know employees are not shy about saying i'm not getting that here so i'm going to leave and go go somewhere else very good um tell us how employee engagement levels changed over the course of the pandemic and where it stands right now yeah so it's splintered really early on actually um i recall data that we gathered at the end of 2020 and with you know more than once a year gauge this in our different surveys up until recently um and you know if my memory serves me around a quarter or so said that they felt actually more engaged and a lot of those were those that just preferred remote working and maybe just didn't want to go to the office before and about the same they're all there about if i recall said that they actually felt less engaged in their role they didn't like um you know maybe the different strains and stresses they were experiencing how their company was having to pivot maybe furloughs had a role there maybe they didn't like enforced remote work when there were lockdowns and i would say that polarization has continued mostly through to now albeit i think with a slightly lower proportion in the last time we get ageless in our surveys who said they felt disengaged but that polarization does still exist which is a big problem and so a lot hinges on policies businesses are making right now about the return to the office about what technologies they're using to support you know hybrid working styles and around what their talent and compensation strategies are as comp as employees look at their different options i would say beyond that sort of polarization that does still exist like more you know some people say actually i'm more engaged now this worked out in my favor and the cohort the other end who are saying actually i still feel disengaged this hasn't worked you know for me the devil is really in the detail and we spent some time you know pulling that apart as we're looking at the data so you know surprising surprise those that had prior experience of working remotely before 2020 um feel more positive now than those that didn't really have much experience at all and have struggled with figuring out how to adapt to it um those teams and those individuals who really feel as though they have a good level of autonomy in their role are very significantly more likely to say they're more engaged now than before very interestingly to me frontline workers so those you know the majority of the workforce operates in some kind of frontline worker role i think sometimes we forget that but if you you know include all the different kinds of frontline worker roles from you know those working in the healthcare profession to you know sort of uh road warriors in the sales force and the field force and you know all of the others that essentially don't work the majority of their time on a fixed site frontline workers are more engaged now and much more likely to be more engaged now than than those who don't work in a front-line role those that work for companies with progressive technology strategies versus those that aren't early adopters that are always very conservative with technology adoption you know those those in those more progressive organizations are more likely to feel more engaged now millennials are much more likely to feel more engaged now than than boomers and so yeah the the devil's in the detail but in a broad sense that polarization still exists there is still a big cohort of employees who feel disengaged and so this is one of the key challenges of course that companies have to figure out um how do you think about your your digital workplace strategy both technology and policy process when you have essentially a more heterogeneous environment in terms of what different employees want what different working styles you're going to have to figure out how to support and you know that that detail around just different groups of workers finding it harder than others there is the potential to really get that wrong and to drive further division if it feels as though there isn't an equitable experience that's being created um and i think that is if i'm honest a large part of what's behind a lot of larger companies leadership saying you have to get back into the office because that is really difficult thinking that has to be done and i think some some companies don't want to do that thinking employees do you think feeling more empowered by or more frustrated by the technology they use to maintain a remote and distributed workforce um that's a good question i mean it's one of those questions that sort of uh you know a it depends sort of answer um it depends on what technology what new technologies if anything has been deployed to support more remote working you know some companies you know have actually gone full bore into researching and thinking about you know what different kinds of technology can you know are more suited to extended uh remote working you know there's been a big bump in sort of virtual whiteboarding tools which prior to the pandemic were relatively niche but which have really found the solid footing as a sort of new collaboration environment so rather than just having people constantly on conferencing calls and messaging apps why don't we get them into a richer more immersive visual environment where you can have you know more purposeful more structured kinds of conversation collaboration so you know that's one example of the kinds of technologies that more progressive kinds of companies have have looked at to support sort of remote and hybrid working i think lots of companies though haven't done that you know lots of companies have you know are relying on you know conferencing tools we all know who which those tools are um and certainly what we found during the pandemic and i think what we still find in our employee surveys is that has been actually just the wrong thing i mean actually before the pandemic before sort of mass remote working in our employee surveys we used to ask you know if there's one thing that could happen to allow you to be more productive and happier in your role what would it be and the answer resoundingly from the surveys was having more time to focus doing solo work not distracted by conversation and of course what happened when we all shifted to remote work it was everyone was having more conversations and so it's sort of it depends i mean you know there are lots of new kinds of technologies and lots of existing technologies that have been you know that companies are you know thinking about how to leverage to support remote work i think you know that's going to help drive engagement for those companies that thinks that you know it's primarily getting people into to zoom into teams and that's problem solved i think that's the data isn't showing that to be the case good uh chris you use the term operational culture what do you mean by that term yeah so i specifically distinguish it from company culture which has more to do with you know company values hr policies it's the sort of tacit social order of a company um operational culture in contrast and i suppose in complement because i suspect it'll become a subset of how we think about wider company cultural issues uh you know it focuses more on the combination of policies and practices and technologies that specifically define how work happens across your organization so that could be you know determined policies around remote in-person hybrid and the technology choices to match to that we just talked about that a little bit you know maybe some teams are practitioners of agile or scaled agile or another framework and there are technologies that may match that some companies have an innovation platform where they allow a workforce to engage and submit ideas to company or divisional problems right so this is a crowdsourcing element to where um maybe some companies have a 20 rule like google did where employees are allowed part of their time to sort of solo problem solve their way um to address company issues maybe workforce analytics is used to understand productivity behaviors there's lots of considerations that guide planning you know are you operating at a more centralized model or in a more distributed model right there's a lot that could go into defining what operational culture is but historically most companies have not actually been that joined up about it right there hasn't really been anyone that's dedicated to architecting documenting and communicating what that operational culture actually is um but that has become much more important now and you know as we've already seen and again as you're telling us in our surveys you know it is working more closely now with hr with operations and other teams to try and move towards uh giving more clarity around how they want the company to actually operate and what the principles and technologies and practices are that define it so very distinct from company culture but something that it sometimes gets mixed up with that's great thank you um folks that brings us to the end of today's presentation and thank you again chris and a very big thank you as well to all of you for joining us today and for continuing to contribute your voice and your insights to 451 alliance research another reminder to please watch for the recording of this webinar and the slide deck which will be emailed to all 451 alliance members tomorrow if you have questions for us here please do reach out by email at 451 alliance 451alliance.com uh or you can follow us on twitter at 451 alliance we do hope you found this presentation useful today and that you can join us for future 451 alliance studies and webinars thank you again for your continued membership and your study participation folks please enjoy the balance of the summer safely and uh goodbye for now thank you again chris pleasure thanks again everyone

2022-09-09 23:28

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