Enterprise Connect: Employee Experience Key to Successful Hybrid Workforce

ENTERPRISE CONNECT — Employee experience is a growing priority amid organizations’ hybrid workforce transitions, and the right partners can help them in this effort.

That’s according to Adam Holtby, a principal analyst at Omdia. During day one of this week’s virtual Enterprise Connect, he led a session on enabling the future of hybrid work. He also disclosed insights and data from Omdia’s 2021 Future of Work survey. It highlights digital workplace objectives businesses must prioritize to improve employee experience and business results. (Omdia, Enterprise Connect and Channel Futures share a parent company, Informa.)

Omdia polled organizations globally for the survey.

Omdia’s Adam Holtby

“If we look at the data, 36% of employees are going to be primarily home- or remote-based with minimal time in the office going forward,” Holtby said. “Only 24% of employees are going to be permanently based in an office working at a dedicated desk, with 22% of employees embracing a more hybrid work style going forward. So if you think about hybrid work styles and those primarily home or remote-based work styles, that accounts for 58% of employees in total, which is a huge number. What organizations need to do now is focus less on work locations and more on building infrastructures, investing in capabilities that help them as a business support employees in working from whatever location they want to work from, and with limited compromises to security and employee productivity.”

Improving Employee Experience Presents Challenges

Getting employees the equipment they need and connected has been difficult, Holtby said. So provisioning and access will be important going forward.

“But more people-centric elements were found to be quite challenging for businesses, too,” Holtby said. “Namely, businesses found supporting employee well-being and ensuring that employees stay productive quite difficult. This ties into that whole employee experience focus that organizations are going to have going forward. It will be important to understand not just the work that people are doing, but how people feel about that work.”

Encouragingly, there are new technologies coming to market to help organizations better understand employee experience, he said.

There are three key elements that organizations need to understand in measuring and positively impacting employee experience, Holtby said. Those are technology experience, employee well-being and processes.

“Processes need to be optimized and automated where possible to deliver those positive employee experiences,” he said. “If processes are monolithic and work isn’t efficient … then people are going to feel bad about it ultimately.”

Scroll through our slideshow above for more on Omdia’s future of work survey and other happenings at Enterprise Connect.