Check out our latest article within the Raconteur Future Workplace report, distributed in The Times – Tech fact, not friction.
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Raconteur Future Workplace – Work-enabling technology in convenient workspaces empowers employees to excel.Improving the employee experience is in the top three focus areas for global HR leaders who want to support business growth in 2019 says Gartner. It makes complete sense: a happy workforce leads to improved productivity, greater talent retention and ultimately better customer experiences.And there is solid research to back this up. Jacob Morgan revealed his findings in the Harvard Business Review showing that companies that focused on employee experience had four times the average profit and more than twice the average revenue of those who didn’t.
Despite this evidence, the modern workplace doesn’t seem to be working when it comes to supporting workers, optimising space effectively and providing technology that enhances positive experiences for employees.Without sensible, work-enabling, technology, workplaces merely create friction – what McKinsey & Company call ‘organisational drag’. With one-size-fits-all workplaces simply no longer possible; workspaces increasingly need technology that enriches rather than enrages. It finds the average company loses 25 per cent of its productive capacity simply by putting people together in one place, dealing with all the inefficient policies and processes this entails (technology deficiencies included). Not only this, its research finds that with each additional 10 per cent increase in staff headcount, firms lose two per cent in productivity.This all creates a strong case to create personalised working experiences for the workforce, designed to support individual as well as provide the best environment for everyone.
In the latest Cloudbooking report (Link) we found more than half (52 per cent) of staff dream of interacting with workplace technology that offers the same sort of personalised experience they already get in their personal lives from the likes of Google or Uber. The reality is – from a significant 59 per cent – that technology is not working as they expect (and actually prevents them doing their jobs properly). If only they had bespoke technology-enabled experiences at work; this is what 61 percent agreed would make them happier about coming to work each day.
While this may not be a huge surprise, the extent to which there is such high expectation about technology making working life easier, possibly is. At Cloudbooking we beliece ‘Experience’ is what employees crave; and good experiences at that. Most workplaces today simply aren’t ‘working’ but technology is now seen as leading the change to make things better. Just as consumer technology is designed to be customer-centric, the workplace technology your business adopts must be employee-centric. It should solve the challenges of your workforce and be something your employees can’t live without.
