Here at Citrix, we talk a lot about the future of work. That’s for good reason. The very nature of how we work is changing, and organizations everywhere are evolving to stay competitive. That means new technologies that support an improved employee experience and the variety of ways we get work done today.
It’s easy to think of these transformations and the expected boosts in employee experience as belonging exclusively to IT. After all, you’re implementing technology.
But you’d be wrong.
Transformations that aim to improve the employee experience must go beyond implementation. They demand a “leader of the future” mindset and approach that embrace close collaboration among IT and HR leaders to ensure that an organization’s technologies support user needs while adhering to HR and security policies alike.
“IT and HR might be different functions with different responsibilities, but they have a joint stake in delivering a high-quality employee experience,” Valerie Hughes-D’Aeth, chief human resources officer at the BBC, told us as part of our work with the Economist Intelligence Unit to investigate the role technology plays in employee experience.
Over the last few months, we interviewed and surveyed more than 1,100 senior technology and business leaders, in eight countries, across a diverse range of industries to understand:
- The drivers and prioritization of employee experience within business today
- The key business outcomes from improved employee experience
- The aspects of technology that drive engagement and productivity
- What we can learn from those that are getting it right
You can find the results in The Experience of Work: The Role of Technology in Productivity and Engagement, which details how business leaders can leverage technology to improve the employee experience, from the time they’re recruited to the time they depart the organization (and beyond).
Drive Your Competitive Advantage with a Great Employee Experience
There’s a talent war going on, and you can expect a global talent shortage of 85 million workers by 2030. A great employee experience will drive your competitive advantage as you manage these challenges and will help you to attract and to retain the best people.
Make no mistake, the biggest influence on employee experience is the organization’s leadership. But our research also found that technology is an important contributor, especially at organizations where the workforce is more engaged and productive than at their rivals and where digital transformation is further along.
Employees can’t do great work — and have a great experience — if they don’t have the right tools at their fingertips. HR and IT must work together to understand these tools and their potential to drive an improved employee experience. For example, employees spend about a quarter of their time every day searching for information they need to do their jobs. How can technology remove that friction and help people get to what they need faster, whether it’s customer data or information required to complete administrative tasks? Our research found that high-performing organizations are 74 percent more likely to include HR in the design and selection of workplace technologies that can solve these kinds of problems and make employees’ day-to-day experience better.
Let’s consider Elina Petrillo, an assistant vice president for HR technology at Northwell Health, a New York-based healthcare network. She serves as a liaison between HR and IT and reports to her organization’s chief human resources officer, who sets the company’s strategy for HR. “I have to tell him what’s possible from a technology perspective and provide him with solutions,” said Petrillo, who also supports the work of her organization’s assistant vice president of employee experience.
Improving Employee Experience: Hard Work That’s Worth It
Improving employee experience is hard work, and collaboration between IT and HR requires much more than quarterly brainstorming sessions or fuzzy goals, measures, and responsibilities. There are obstacles, like a lack of mutual understanding and common objectives. But the hard work to tackle and overcome these challenges together is worth it. Our research revealed that in organizations where employees are more productive and engaged:
- Nearly 90 percent of CIOs and CHROs surveyed viewed digital transformation as a shared project.
- Almost half the organizations had developed KPIs that both HR and IT can use to measure employee experience.
- About 80 percent had employees with both HR and IT experience to serve as bridges between the two departments.
- More than 80 percent had been able to quantify improvements to employee experience in financial terms.
Keep in mind, though, that technology isn’t a panacea for an ailing employee experience. There’s much more to improving your employee experience, like recruiting the right people and creating and nurturing the right culture.
As we detail in our report, technology is a lever — an important one — that HR and IT can pull together to improve the employee experience. It can help us to deliver the flexibility today’s workforce demands. It can simplify our day-to-day work so we can focus on what matters most. It can broaden our pool of potential employees far beyond those near our offices. It can help us to deliver on our values and principles. And it can help to enable the future of work.
You can learn more about the intersection of HR and IT by downloading the full report at theexperienceofwork.economist.com.
