With hybrid and remote workforces, organizations need to give employees a ‘voice’ to dictate what and how tech is implemented.
Technology has consistently paved the way for employees to do their jobs effectively: facilitating access to workplace tools, helping to improve productivity; increasing the speed of business; and fundamentally changing the way organizations and their workforce interact and carry out transactions.
Increased employee engagement improves customer satisfaction and overall business results. A recent Harvard Business Review survey on the critical role of technology in employee engagement showed that 92% of respondents feeling that employee engagement was critical to their organization’s success.
Some 54% of respondents indicated that better employee engagement resulted in satisfied customers. About 53% of respondents also agreed to prompts that there were additional benefits: the quality of products or services was better when employees were happier.
According to the Gallup Institute, terminated employees cost US companies US$450bn – $550bn a year in lost productivity. Keeping employees engaged is an everlasting challenge: in the current pandemic, this challenge has been doubled because employees are scattered across remote workplaces. The challenge of keeping an increasingly engaged digital workforce is greater as more companies move to telecommuting.
Strategizing for employee engagement
We live in the digital age: 82% of respondents in the above surveys indicated that employee happiness at work was significantly affected by the performance of technology in the workplace.
According to the data, powerful, easy-to-use software contributes to employee satisfaction, enabling a more productive experience. Of course, hard-to-use and inflexible software will have the opposite effect, leaving employees discouraged. It can even drive them to seek better working conditions elsewhere.
In fact, 77% of respondents said good employees will look for a new employer if their current job does not provide the tools, technology or information they need to do their job well.
Still, getting the right tools is only part of the solution. Empowering employees to give their input in the selection of tools is equally important as a strategy.
In a “Voice in the Choice” survey commissioned by Freshworks, 96% of employees surveyed indicated they had little or no involvement in the software purchase decision, and more than half noted that having the right tools would result in happier customers and better productivity .
Workplace technology plays a key role in helping to boost employee engagement, and the choice of tools and technology must be democratized. Ultimately, we need to focus on results for the employee and for the customer.
