This is a guest blog post by Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.
With hindsight, it’s easy to look back and see how our workplaces and cultures could have been better prepared for a year like 2020. Our digital infrastructures weren’t as strong and dynamic as we hoped, our work cultures and skills weren’t as ready for new ways of working as we needed, and our digital applications were simply designed for a different era and different needs. But hindsight only provides perspective on what could have been better. It doesn’t necessarily create a map for the future to anticipate twists and turns, especially in today’s disruptive times.
The reality today is that organizations still must take stock and prepare for a new future of work. One where large-scale change — created by an exponential continuum of global tech innovation along with recent systemically disruptive events — is a regular fixture. Research has shown that deeply interconnected systems, which our human world of pervasive transportation systems and digital networks has now become, are highly effective at rapidly propagating and amplifying disruptive events. Yet undeniably, there is also great value in our global supply chains and widely available digital knowledge, among the many attendant benefits of technology. In the end, it’s a double-edged sword. As with all technology, there are both benefits and opportunity costs.
However, the fragile state-of-affairs for our workplace is not one of those costs. Today’s challenging remote work situation is mostly the result of rapid unexpected and extraordinary change. Dysfunction of work has not been endemic and organizations can certainly commit to creating a more robust, resilient, and adaptable workplace if they choose. In fact, better adaptation is likely not going to be a choice, if the pace of major impactful events this year with the global pandemic is any indication.
Our businesses and workers now need the very best we can offer them, to nurture them through the difficult work situation of today. It will also position them for a brighter future, with all the effects which that foreknowledge will have on their mental and even physical state. Building and maintaining a powerful new digital employee experience that fosters seamless collaboration, improved creativity, higher productivity, and better engagement is crucial to not just surviving but driving revitalization and growth.
In this way, not only can organizations help workers more fully meet their true potential, but organizations must now access to that potential more than ever before. In an uncertain economic environment, successful revitalization and innovation is the only sure way out. With today’s latest work technologies, the dreams of HR departments and employees themselves can now be realized. Namely, tapping the full power of our organization’s human capabilities.
But doing this successfully depends on applying the right employee experience technology to the full spectrum of business and personal needs. This ranges from creating seamless access to digital touchpoints and safe, seamless security protections to empowering tools to manage all aspects of work and life while steadily enriching and enabling their daily experience in a more personalized way so that they reach their full potential.
Rethinking Employee Experience: Challenging but Highly Rewarding
However, for many organizations it won’t be as easy as they wish to transform work in this now necessary way. That’s because digital employee experience currently consists of hundreds to thousands of different digital applications within most organizations. Upgrading and improving them has long been a daunting task. So to is the improvement of the technical foundation to support rapidly shifting security threats, improved ease-of-access, higher usability, better trainability, governance, and compliance, and so on.
Complexity is the enemy here, especially for employee experience. Yet it can also aid the process. New mindsets have emerged that now allow us to manage complexity better. Recent success stories have unleashed new insights that point to fresh breakthroughs, as well as new lessons learned on how to remove obstacles to the transformation of work.
The next part of this series will explore how to activate the enablers and overcome the obstacles to the transformation of work.
Until recently, however, many senior leaders did not even regard employee experience as a significant digital concern. Now, with the widespread shift to remote work, it has suddenly become mostly digital. In this way, culture plays an undeniable part in employee experience, perhaps even more with digital remote work. What’s more, culture is key to engagement. And successful employee engagement takes more than a digital-friendly employee experience. It requires a robust corporate culture that uses it for its strengths such as visibly cultivating shared values, being transparent, and fostering open collaboration, among other traits.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to adjust to new ways of working. Organizations can incorporate a roadmap for employee experience into their operating model to remove complexity from hybrid and distributed work environments, helping employees to do their best work.
One key insight from studying years of digital adoption reveals how technology enables culture as much as any other factor, by guiding people through new processes and behaviors in fresh directions that eventually become internalized. Culture can be included in the digital employee experience.
Including culture in these changes offers hope because the traditional anchors of employee experience have long been the worker’s physical environment, their technology environment, and the organization’s culture. With remote work, the physical environment has become greatly diminished and the digital has become preeminent. But work culture, long more connected to the physical, has not yet caught up to the digital primacy of work today and for the likely future. Yet digital offers a new on-ramp for it.
A More Modern, Humanized Digital Work Is Arriving
All the effort that has gone into businesses and technology has only ever been about one thing: people. Whether it’s creating value for customers, partners or suppliers, or workers, work is a human activity with human ends. But in the early days of technology at work, which has been the last 40 years of information technology evolution, this human-centric focus has sometimes been lost.
The pandemic has brought the human dimension back in spades, reminding us unavoidably of what is most important: human health, well-being, and prosperity. These are the core fountain of all downstream business benefits, from shared value creation to innovation. This is leading us back to a improved hierarchy of worker needs (see the figure above) when it comes to what is required from a digital workplace today in order to properly support the full requirements of the post-pandemic worker journey.
To understand how organizations must transform and evolve the digital employee experience post-pandemic, it’s worth looking at these some of these new changes in worker needs:
- Ensuring truly seamless access — The digital employee experience must now deliver and enable every aspect of the worker’s day, from basic identity and access authentication, to combined application and data delivery, worker communication and collaboration, systems of record, systems of insight, productivity tools, and new digital enablement platforms including employee engagement, digital adoption, work management, and so on, with a more holistic, better integrated, and seamless user experience that now also includes a fresh focus on the overall contextual situation of the worker.
- Even more focus on security and safety — As noted above, employee well-being has significantly grown in importance. It now must become a core capability of employee experience. This means well-being from a physical and psychological wellness perspective, as well as the overall security of their worker’s privacy and the organization’s information, especially customer data. The new digital employee experience will incorporate proactive elements of health and well-being tracking related to the worker — as well as greatly improved cybersecurity, data safety, and privacy features. Employee experience and security are often seen to be on opposite sides of the spectrum. However, when done well, they happen together and reinforce versus oppose one another. The benefits of integrating zero trust, SASE and other security priorities are clear. The goal is to guide the workforce experience and security outcomes to be continuously situationally-aware and contextually risk appropriate. This enables us to move forward confidently and support a new way of working without compromising security, collaboration or business productivity.
- An emphasis on resilience — The previously fragile and easily-disrupted state of work is now increasingly well understood through the lens of hindsight. The new digital employee experience will be tougher and stronger, much better at handling exceptions, point failures, situational change, shifts in location, and on-the-fly adaptations while accumulating as little long-term baggage as possible. Delivery of experience through the cloud, with self-repairing and dynamically rerouting network services, as well as applications that proactively help the user adapt to new changes in work processes and procedures will become more inherent in the digital employee experience.
Using technology to reimagine work post COVID-19: Top thought leaders discuss huge shifts in the workplace, focusing on technology as it shapes human interaction.
Think Big but Act Now in Stages
A big lesson from the digital world in the last 20 years is that waiting too long to make improvements makes them much harder to make later. For some large organizations, adopting a new employee experience-centric approach will pose certain challenges, particularly in the work culture not adopting them at first. However, because the work experience today — and consequently the change — is almost entirely digital, it turns out the culture will now have a harder time rejecting new approaches, as they will be embedded in the experience itself.
Fulfilling the promise of an modern employee experience requires the full support of IT, HR, and the organization’s leadership together to guide employees through the necessary shifts, especially making sure individuals understand the new approach and why it is better A key starting point that greatly accelerates such change efforts is to define the shared responsibilities and expectations in these areas: where employee experience stops and human-resources management begins. What is new about the incoming digital culture, and what is being left behind. What is most valued in the employee experience, and what is being changed.
Employee experience should enable both individuals and teams to work in the most efficient and effective ways possible through digital workspaces and collaborative work management platforms (including those like Wrike), providing:
- A single source of truth and collaboration with context across the organization
- 360° visibility into projects, workflows and progress
- One flexible and configurable solution for all teams to maximize productivity
- Cross-departmental collaboration in real time to drive action and results
- Automated workflows to improve efficiency and keep things moving forward
- Security that exceeds standards, from datacenters to encryption and permissions
- Pre-built and customizable integrations
- Simplified resource management to ensure projects get done, on budget and time
- Intelligent productivity-boosting tech (data-reinforced AI and machine learning)
- Extensive reporting to measure progress and gauge results
Building an improved employee experience that is fit for the modern age, with supporting worker education, enabling policies, modern technologies, and more powerful practices will propel the organization into the future by its very nature, This means getting the design right will be essential. Another key to success is balancing organizational needs with employee autonomy. Why? Because like virtually no time before, a company’s future now depends on having enabled workers that can locally realize the changes — whether they’re in a company office, at home or working remotely from any other location as part of a hybrid workforce strategy that represents the future of work today for many.
As Tim Minahan, Citrix Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and CMO, has said, “The need to deliver a secure and simplified work experience for employees has never been more critical.”
With the rise of pervasive digital communications and mass collaboration services, today’s employees face new challenges trying to keep up effective engagement with an increasing number of colleagues and customers. The leading work coordination platforms (highlighted in the Q1 2021 Constellation ShortList™) aim to help alleviate these challenges by bringing structure, prioritization and accountability to work by helping employees better organize and optimize their productivity and effectiveness.
Redesigning work, including tackling the needed cultural and structural changes, is a journey that will pay existential dividends. Yet it is also one that requires sufficient investment, change velocity, and confidence in action. However, with care and close attention, especially in response to early feedback and initial results — and especially in tuning today’s hybrid workforce environment to be fully adapted to what workers really need at home, the office and everywhere in between — the investment will make organizations far more attractive to fresh talent, more productive for existing workers, create higher resilience to disruption, and make it much more competitive in the market.
About the Author
Dion Hinchcliffe is widely regarded as one of the top digital employee experience experts in the world. He is a bestselling book author, frequent keynote speaker, analyst, futurist, and strategy expert based in Washington, D.C. He is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research as well as an Executive Fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. Leadtail has recently ranked him the #2 global influencer of CIOs. You can find Dion on Twitter at @dhinchcliffe.
