Hybrid working promises employees the flexibility and improved work-life balance they have always craved. They can start later, or finish earlier. Spend more time with their children, or hit the gym in the middle of the day. As hybrid working becomes the norm, businesses are realizing that the digital experience is equally becoming a key part of employees’ day to day lives and can seriously impact how much they enjoy their jobs.
There are many points of digital friction that can disrupt successful workflows. No doubt many of us have fallen victim to non-performant applications making us late to meetings, faulty laptops causing frustration, or simply not knowing how to use the latest version of available software.
If such issues continue going unchecked, workers could be held back from doing their jobs effectively, impacting business success and even preventing tech-savvy recruits from joining the workforce.
What does this mean for businesses in reality?
We all know ‘The Great Resignation’ is underway, and organizations need to do everything they can to hold on to their talent. It’s concerning then that our research found that 30% of hybrid employees said a poor digital experience had made them want to leave a job or had contributed to them leaving a job.
Technology is also essential for attracting new talent. ‘Gen Z’ are now entering the workforce, and research shows that 80% of this generation want to work with ‘cutting-edge tech.’ It’s clear that nailing the digital experience needs to be a major priority for employers to satisfy their current and future employees.
Aside from making employees frustrated, digital friction has an impact on their workflows. For example, at one organization we work with, we found their finance teams were using a spreadsheet for calculations that weren’t provided by the in-house system. This meant employees were having to spend a couple of minutes switching out of the system, completing the spreadsheet, and then switching back to the main system.
Typically, each individual was doing this multiple times a day, adding up to a significant amount of wasted time per week for the organization’s many thousands of frontline workers. In this situation, a relatively minor change – incorporating the necessary calculations into the main system – eliminated the need to switch over, saving time and many thousands of dollars.
Actionable insights and proactive change
Spotting the kinds of inefficient IT processes in the example above can improve productivity and save costs, but with a distributed workforce, it’s much more challenging to identify them.
Simply asking employees for their feedback is no longer the most effective way of uncovering inefficient workflows. This is because often users have been doing a process for so long that it has become semi-automatic – they don’t even think of it as inefficient anymore.
To truly combat digital friction, organizations need a centralized workforce analytics platform that can proactively evaluate the user journey in detail to reveal and eliminate points of friction.
Enter Scalable Software’s workplace analytics platform, Acumen. It provides IT teams with actionable insights into end-users’ experience, as well as the technologies they use to get work done. For example:
- Hardware Utilization: Determine performance of the organization’s end-user hardware estate and identify any potential impact on user experience or productivity
- Application stability: Determine the stability of the organization’s end-user applications and identify any potential impact on user experience or productivity due to faults, e.g. software crash data
- Software usage and deployment: Track usage of specific software products and if users are missing out on functionality because they are running an old version
Businesses are starting to realize that as employees, we’re all more productive (and less frustrated) when we’re working with systems and technologies that are powerful, easy to use, and seamlessly connected with each other. By revealing and eliminating friction points through data, organizations take one step closer to achieving a digital experience that is fit for our new hybrid world.
Learn more about how Acumen can help your organization.
