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As soon as employees could work from anywhere, companies could start hiring from anywhere. Suddenly organizations that were once concentrated in geographic areas began considering how to support a global workforce.
As a result, over 70% of white collar workers are now fully remote, and in some areas as much as 52% of hybrid workers recently suggested they would quit their jobs if required to go back into the office full time. The extraordinary challenge of rethinking business operations on the fly for this new global movement has required IT to take a more proactive role.
I see three emerging areas where this new paradigm of work is already having a profound influence. Here are a few ideas on how we can confidently move toward a more global workforce:
Also see: Making the Shift to a Hybrid Work Environment
Build Employee Experience for Remote Workers
For years, one of the biggest challenges of remote work has been building and maintaining employee engagement. As health-driven lockdowns stretched into month after month of working from home, that engagement dropped to historic lows.
Employee engagement rates have sunk to between 20-30%, according to recent reporting by Gallup. Waves of people are leaving their jobs due to the appeal of new opportunities, burnout and frustration – a mass phenomenon news outlets have been calling The Great Resignation.
Companies have seized upon this disappearing engagement as a mandate to prioritize employee experience. Normally, that would be a problem for HR to solve, but in 2021, it also now also falls upon the IT team.
This counterintuitive reliance on IT came about because companies are trying to improve their employee experience by offering flexible hours, collaborative software tools, and the ability to work from anywhere – all initiatives that require IT to build on behalf of the organization. On an even more fundamental level, employees don’t have in-person meetings, watercooler chats, and personal facetime with co-workers anymore, so companies have to rely on technology to replace them.
IT leaders can take up this charge by proactively recommending new technology systems that will help build a strong employee experience, like virtual events, improved tools, and gifting platforms.
It’s also essential for companies to regularly collect feedback from this newly remote workforce that allows them to understand how to improve the employment landscape and monitor sensitive programs like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Create an Asynchronous Work Environment
A major consequence of telling employees they can work anytime and anywhere is that people actually will work anytime and anywhere. For many companies – in particular, newly global companies – this means the organization now has to offer a work environment that embraces conflicting time zones.
This challenge multiplies when we consider how overloaded most employees are with meetings. Recent research from Harvard Business Review pointed out that, on average, 15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings each week. There’s a reason the clarion call of the modern worker is: “this meeting could have been an email.” (In fact, our own research shows that 74% of workers have had that exact thought about meetings at some point.)
This challenge multiplies when we consider how overloaded most employees are with meetings.
A meeting-centric way of doing business isn’t sustainable and it isn’t practical for distributed workforces. Moving toward an asynchronous work environment is another area where IT teams need to lead the way.
Giving people the ability to collaborate on projects according to their own schedules is a much more effective and employee-friendly way to empower people. For example, if the purpose of a meeting is for one person to share information to attendees and collaboration is not required, the host could simply record a video of themselves discussing the information.
By sharing that recorded video, meeting attendees can watch at a time that suits them best. Other possibilities include an internal database for new resources or a virtual blackboard to share ideas, all deployed across departments or teams.
We are still in the early days of innovation with asynchronous work environments, but development is moving quickly. IT has an opportunity to evaluate needs, find solutions and make recommendations that work alongside company goals. The teams that do it well will help build a much more effective way of conducting business with a distributed workforce.
Be Smart about Automating Processes
The next big thing for virtually all industries is automation. Companies that adopt automation will be able to act with much more agility and at far greater scale.
For example, IT teams can delegate answering frequent questions to a bot, such as “How do I reset my password?” – freeing up their time to spend on more complex work. Automation will become an irreplaceable element as more companies expand to a global reach.
But automation done wrong can significantly hinder a company. Replacing human judgement and experience with algorithms can create blind spots and increase biases.
Judicious use of automation will offer extraordinary benefits, including triggering next steps in projects, communicating with customers in any time zone, and connecting employees. Automation will also increase a company’s need for rock-solid IT teams that can stay ahead of trends and keep everything running.
Replacing human judgement and experience with algorithms can create blind spots and increase biases.
The next steps for virtually every IT leader will be understanding how best to adopt and deploy automation tools in their organizations. Along with evaluating options, IT will need to understand the company’s needs and bring in the “good” automation (which helps people work) instead of the “bad” (which subverts human judgment).
Now is the time for IT to shine. As companies and their workforces continue to evolve and expand across the globe, managing their technology has become an essential element of their success.
As with everything within IT’s purview, privacy and security are essential to these new experiences. Building your stack with a strong security foundation will help ensure all of these programs and services help move company goals forward.
Also see: Top Digital Transformation Companies
About the Author:
Eric Johnson, CIO, Momentive