Companies are taking notice that they need to fundamentally rethink their employees’ experience. More and more, our daily lives are defined by experiences that make things easier — except when it comes to work. While consumer interactions get faster, simpler, and more connected, workplace experiences are as laborious, disparate, and complex as ever.
The result: steadily declining employee engagement and productivity, which translates into lackluster employee experience and poor outcomes at all levels of the business.
The concept and totality of employee experience is extensive and includes everything from the physical work environment to benefits. But when grouped and analyzed together, a simple equation emerges:
Employee experience = engagement + productivity
Historically, we have measured productivity by comparing inputs to outputs. As users, employees, and employers, we ultimately want to increase our outputs while maintaining or even decreasing our inputs.
Technology has greatly improved productivity throughout the last century, but the pace of improvement is slowing. Despite all the transformative technologies over the last decade — cloud computing, smartphones, nearly ubiquitous wireless connectivity — growth in productivity is no longer accelerating.
There is a consistent inhibitor: interruptions.
With the rise of wearables and smartphones, we are bombarded with notifications. In fact, studies show we are interrupted every few minutes, and it takes 25 minutes to return to the task at hand. All this switching has a significant productivity costs — as much as 40 percent of our time is spent shifting between tasks.
Given that lost time, the rise of tools and products designed and marketed to help boost productivity is not surprising. A plethora of products — from task and work management to complex enterprise solutions — focus on various ways to improve productivity. But companies will not see the ROI on these investments without also improving engagement.
Organizations are recognizing the importance of employee engagement because not only does it have an impact on the business, it affects the ability to attract and retain talent. Engagement has many drivers, including clarity and purpose of work, autonomy and empowerment, work/life balance, and community. Disengagement in the workforce has significant business impacts, costing companies $1.4 trillion per year.
Engagement has a direct impact on productivity. Companies with high levels of employee engagement report 20 percent higher productivity and 21 percent higher profitability. Engagement helps drive personal productivity because engaged employees are more likely to put in additional effort in their work. Actively disengaged employees are almost twice as likely as engaged employees to seek new jobs. Additional implications to organizational productivity occur with effects on cost and time. On average, it costs $4,129 and take 42 days to hire a new employee.
The relationship between engagement and productivity is crucial when it comes to technology.
Yes, technology can help a worker save time in performing a task, but if the employee is disengaged, the time saved might not benefit the organization. Only by holistically addressing both productivity and engagement can that technology help to transform the employee experience. Citrix Workspace enables every professional to work in a unified, secure, and intelligent way that removes roadblocks to creativity and innovation — delivering a transformative experience that helps to organize, guide, and automate work.
Organizing, Guiding, and Automating
Organizing work is the first step to addressing employee experience. Citrix Workspace provides a unified, omnichannel experience that aggregates all relevant content, data, apps, and desktops employees need to get work done. Secure access controls enable organizations to protect their most sensitive assets. And IT gets the visibility and controls it needs to support changing ways of working.
The next step is guiding work. This step is crucial because just bringing together information doesn’t make it significantly more accessible or efficient. Citrix Workspace helps employees focus and facilitates work by reducing noise and organizing information and tasks into a prioritized, personal flow. A virtual assistant provides immediate access to relevant content and business data. The experience evolves with employee needs to become more personalized and intelligent over time.
The last step is automating work. Through learned behaviors, Citrix Workspace can automate repetitive tasks so employees can focus on value-driving activities that help grow the business.
Citrix Workspace organizes, guides, and automates work by using machine learning to simplify and automate repetitive tasks and workflows. Customized to user needs and preferences, the experience adapts to changing worker behaviors. Infused with intelligence, the platform continually learns from and evolves with changing business realities and requirements.
Driving organizational agility enhances engagement and productivity.
To meet the rapidly evolving demands of their employees, organizations must choose the tools that enable the right level of organizational agility. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65 percent of application development activity. Low-code tooling, out-of-the-box integrations with line-of-business applications and pre-built, third-party experience integrations such as Microsoft Teams are essential to enabling the organizational agility that reaches employees where they want to work. Citrix Workspace uses these tools to provide a frictionless user experience and enable simple, one-click actions to aid in agile workflows.
Do you want to reimagine your employee experience and increase your organizational agility? Take a look at how Citrix Workspace provides a unified, secure, and intelligent solution with low-code development tools and integrations to increase engagement and simplify technology.
