This is a guest blog post by Tamara McCleary, CEO at Thulium.co.
“Today’s workforce faces a triple threat when it comes to productivity, and IT often finds itself unable to fully support all its needs.” — Jack Gold
This is the second post in my Future of Work series on digital distraction in the modern workplace. In my first post, I discussed our decreasing attention span and increasing distraction due to technology and its impact on business growth.
Triple Threat
- Employees working in many locations (Think the gig economy, and the work-from-anywhere, remote workforce.)
- Working on multiple devices (+BYOD)
- Multiple applications
Relationship Status: It’s Complicated.
We are a geographically dispersed workforce, using multiple devices and loads of applications. What could possibly go wrong?
Employee experience isn’t free beer and a pool table in the break room. We’re talking about an entirely complex set of variables that employees must navigate on a daily basis. What’s the cost of lost engagement? Productivity and an efficient and cost effective IT operation.
Employee experience is broken.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Jack Gold, who just published his white paper, Business Benefits of Enabling the Modern Workforce. In it, he encourages organizations to move to a modern workspace approach to enable user engagement and experience to improve overall productivity. In his report he dives into the challenges as well as the benefits of maximizing productivity for the workforce, in addition to the challenges facing IT in providing optimized services and solutions. I spoke with him about these challenges, opportunities, costs, and benefits. Here’s what he had to say.
You’re an analyst. What got you interested in this subject? What was your inspiration to do your white paper on this topic?
I’ve worked with many companies that just don’t value the productivity of their workers in the same light as they do in tech investments and/or building out quality customer interactions. As an analyst for many years and working with many organizations large and small, I understand the need to focus on workforce productivity and the major effect it can have on business success. I’ve spent a lot of time educating organizations on various ROI and TCO scenarios, so this was a logical project to undertake.
What surprised you most when you conducted your research? Did anything surprise you?
Companies go into infinite detail in looking at sales, manufacturing, supply chain, etc., to best utilize their resources. But few look at their employees as similarly valuable resource needing to be maximized. And almost none look to measure worker productivity. This is a major flaw in business planning at many enterprises, and this paper was an attempt to guide organizations in looking at productivity in the same detail they would for other business components.
How does an organization attract talent?
Most think they just need to go out and find the best talent and that the rest will be fine. The truth is, you need to help your talent stay talented. If you have systems in place that make great talent mediocre, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Further, word will get out if your work experience is not optimum to get the job done, especially today in what is a hyper-competitive market for talent, and you’ll have trouble attracting new talent. Maintaining key talent is as much, or more, of a critical need as acquisition.
The onboarding process can be the first place where employees begin to experience dissatisfaction with their employer, second-guessing their decision to take employment in the first place. As a subject matter expert and analyst, what is your take on the onboarding process? Big mistakes? Any fixes or advice for organizations?
One big mistake many companies make is that they think the onboarding process hasn’t changed in many years. In truth, the notion of taking four or five days or more to get an employee situated and up to speed is outdated. Workers are used to interacting digitally almost instantly on smart devices of all types and can’t understand why it takes a company a week to get them a new PC and get them set up on the various back office systems they need. There are many reasons for this old style onboarding, but moving to a modern workspaces approach can add as much as three to five days of employee productivity each. If you look at the opportunity cost, it can easily amount to $45K per 100 new hires per year.
We’ve heard a lot about the cost of attrition. What’s your advice on bolstering employee retention?
Worker frustration in their job is even more hazardous to them staying in your organization than salaries, according to many studies. If workers feel devalued or are frustrated in their work environment, they are highly likely to look at moving on. And as I said earlier, if it takes six months to get a new employee fully up to speed, employee attrition is a huge cost. A modern workspaces approach will enhance the ability to keep employees by removing a lot of the system frustrations. Studies have shown as much as an 18 percent productivity improvement for fully engaged employees; that organizations with high employee engagement show a 2.3x greater revenue growth over a three-year period; and that customer retention rates are 18 percent higher in organizations with highly engaged employees.
How are you seeing the relationship between CIOs and CHROS (or IT and HR) changing, and why is this important?
Companies should not be segregating IT from HR or line of business (LOB). The goal is to make the entire organization productive and not just optimize each individual function. Without a combined strategic approach that utilizes the best from all groups — HR, LOB and IT — it’s impossible to build the best working environment and to maximize productivity accordingly.
What’s the benefit for IT?
Modern workspace approaches offer a potentially huge advantage to IT and support organizations. It significantly reduces the potential for security/data breaches, which can cost up to $8K per employee for each data breach ($80M in a 10,000-employee organization). Further, through an SSO approach to authorization, it can save as much as $5.5M per year in reduced authentication and password problems/costs. Finally, it can save more than $3M in lost productivity costs in delaying, deploying and getting users access to needed productivity apps. These are just some of the costs we’ve modeled in our research, and they show the kinds of major negative impacts not having a modern approach to workspaces can have on an enterprise.
What’s the benefit for LOB?
Just like with IT, there are major cost benefits in deploying a modern workspaces approach. For example, an enterprise with 10,000 employees can save over $2M in lost productivity cost by enabling workers to get faster access to new and/or updated apps they need to get their work done. Organizations can also save almost $5M per year in cost of PC failures, or $450 per employee per year. That’s enough to pay for a new PC (or other device) in as little as two years, rather than waiting the typical three to five years for upgrades. So there are really significant productivity savings to be had by going to a modern workspaces approach that maximizes the worker’s user experience.
Want to learn more? Check out the on-demand webinar — The tie between modern digital workspaces and employee experience – I recently did with Jack and Vishal Ganeriwala, Senior Director, Product Marketing Workspace Services at Citrix. And look out for part three in my blog series!
