Treating Knowledge Workers Better Is Key To Business Success

Innovation Treating Knowledge Workers Better Is Key To Business Success Sumir Karayi Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Aug 9, 2022, 06:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin CEO and founder of 1E , leading the company’s focus on real-time digital experience management.

getty During the pandemic, Gartner analysts estimated that more than half of the global knowledge workforce moved from the company office to the home office. For those not accustomed to working remotely, performing all work through devices—including collaboration and communication—was a drastic change. Despite the uncertainty and associated challenges, many of the biggest companies achieved tremendous growth and performed better than expectations.

Now that knowledge workers have operated remotely for more than two years, they won’t easily give up the luxury of choice. And why would they? Their lives are richer and better-balanced thanks to more family time and zero commutes. That said, businesses still need to overcome key hurdles stemming from hybrid environments, including measuring productivity, maintaining culture and improving the digital experience.

Although the first two can take significant time and effort, the third can be surprisingly simple with the right approach and capabilities. Shift To Outcome-Based Work Before the pandemic, it was relatively easy to measure productivity through routine in-office interactions with employees. Now that the office isn’t there to facilitate these encounters, businesses must adapt to managing outcomes.

MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Straightforward in theory, the challenge lies in getting granular enough so that employees exchange feedback and course corrections regularly. Google, Intel, Salesforce and many others have claimed to have solved this issue, but I contend it remains a challenge for every business, only exacerbated by remote working. We need to have an open and honest discussion about this issue and come up with solutions that consider the new reality of people working from anywhere.

Champion Social Interaction Culture presents a second challenge. Camaraderie and ideas are often born from the random and unplanned conversations between colleagues. And although the “watercooler effect” may be overstated, without casual interactions like these, business life can be much poorer, as employees struggle to form bonds and trust.

In response, we should encourage all attempts to organize online social interactions​​, whether it be virtual happy hours or special Slack channels. But humans still have an innate need for physical interaction—a challenge that sociology, behavioral science, psychology and many other disciplines are dealing with. Improve The Digital Employee Experience A significant part of the solution to these challenges may lie within an unlikely department—IT.

Specifically, it can start with the IT departments that embrace creating a strong digital employee experience (DEX). The laptop is the single most important tool to the knowledge worker, whether at home or in the office. In most hybrid or remote settings, rather than walking over to the IT department when issues arise, employees are relegated to contacting the service desk, which means they often can’t work, collaborate or communicate effectively in the interim.

This is unacceptable. Laptops should always be performant and error-free, and when a problem occurs, it should be resolved quickly and with minimal disruption, wherever the person is working. Although this is possible today, only 34% of organizations say they have the capabilities to properly support remote and hybrid work needs, according to research conducted by Forrester and commissioned by 1E.

Because you can’t improve what you can’t measure, organizations must first prioritize digital experience monitoring and analysis to better understand the daily interactions of employees with technology. Even organizations with a dedicated DEX team often lack the necessary metrics for measuring, quantifying and continuously improving employee experience. And although it’s extremely important to ask employees for feedback, it must be done with context and timing in mind.

When an issue has been resolved, IT should first ask the employee whether they’re satisfied. If an employee uses a tool extensively, they may be an expert and potential ally of IT, so also seek their opinion on performance, capabilities and alternatives. Likewise, if an employee doesn’t use a solution even though their cohort does, this may indicate another issue altogether.

Yet, measurements will only get you so far. Too often, employees responsible for reporting on experience lack the resources to resolve issues and do so quickly. Employees want issues resolved immediately, not hours later.

Yet, most IT tools aren’t designed with real-time functionality, leading to both increased employee frustrations and IT workload. Unfortunately, IT is still too often reliant on remote desktop connections, which tend to be disruptive, inefficient and impossible to automate. But some companies are offering real-time diagnostics and remediation solutions that can check the state of all laptops in an organization simultaneously and fix issues quickly.

Although these automated, real-time tools are available today, only 10% of organizations are currently able to self-heal devices. And other research shows that in companies that lack self-healing abilities, ” one in four endpoint devices reported unhealthy applications at any given time. ” Until we evolve beyond using screen sharing for IT fixes, we can’t expect to meaningfully improve DEX.

The Forrester study shows organizations that prioritize DEX programs are 62% and 33% more likely to report higher employee retention and employee satisfaction, respectively. In a work-from-anywhere world, DEX maturity can help businesses attract the best knowledge workers from around the globe—a major competitive advantage. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

Do I qualify? Follow me on LinkedIn . Check out my website . Sumir Karayi Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.