When it comes to business these days, it’s not just the customer who’s always right—it’s the employee, too. Prospective employees today are more selective than ever when it comes to deciding where they want to work, which means companies need to roll out the red carpet in order to attract and retain the top talent. That all starts with improving the employee experience, which is the intersection of employee expectations, needs and wants.
Prioritizing employee experience is crucial for any company looking for long-term viability and success. Author Jacob Morgan writes in his book The Employee Experience Advantage that organizations focused on employee experience have more than four times the average profits and two times the average revenue of companies that don’t. Moreover, companies that prioritize the employee experience are included 11.5 times more often on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work and 28 times more often among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies.
End User Technology for Employee Experience
So, what’s an easy-win for a company looking to bolster their employee experience? End user technology. Morgan’s research found that 30% of an employee’s experience stems from their organization’s use of technology. The Digital Workspace provides path forward for the future of work. It allows employees to access and manage all their digital assets and devices, both personal and professional to achieve productivity, mobility and flexibility. Without a Digital Workspace to securely deliver the devices and tools needed, it’s very difficult for employees within a company to collaborate with one another or their systems of records. So, it should come as no surprise that companies who give employees anytime, anywhere access to the apps that they desire are nearly three times as likely to be rated leaders in digital transformation—and yet, only 24% of employees surveyed say their IT department does so.
Millennials in particular have high expectations for smart workplace technologies that increase efficiency, and catering to these expectations will be pivotal for many companies moving forward. By 2020, millennials are set to make up half of the workforce, expanding to a whopping 75% by 2025. Ninety-three percent of millennial workers report that a company having up-to-date technology is one of the most important factors when choosing where to work, with 42% stating they would leave a company that uses technology they find substandard. However, in the short-term, increasingly these expectations are permeating the workforce as employees of all demographics demand the flexibility to work from anywhere, on their own terms.
Evolving Requirements of our Current and Future Workforce
The question companies should be asking is can we meet the needs of the next generation of workers? How do we empower our staff to be productive regardless of location or device? The lifecycle of how people consume technology is fundamentally broken because of the legacy ways devices are provisioned for end users coupled with massive device proliferation. Today, a worker has 2.5-2.6 devices on average—this is set to increase to between five or six devices in the next year or two. Employees will expect the seamless use, management and integration of all of these devices, yet most IT departments simply aren’t equipped to bear this weight.
As we look at the evolving requirements of our current and future workforce, the existing approach doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Top-down IT no longer makes the cut. The new model must deliver on the promise to put employees first. So how do we get there?
Improving the End User’s Experience
Improving the end user’s experience starts on Day One. When new employees onboard at VMware, IT isn’t standing in the way. We want our employees to be productive from the get-go, and we do this through our own implementation of Workspace ONE. Our EUC team member Andrew Morgan explained that “In only a few clicks, my phone, personal iPad and work laptop were registered and enabled with Single Sign-On (SSO) to company email, data, Office 365, apps and intranet.” The is the first step. When you let employees work in the ways they want and need to be successful, the technology you provide needs to be device-agnostic. Deployment needs to be quick and easy for a user that onboards in the physical office or logs in from their home across the world. Secondly, password management should not fall on the shoulders of your employees. A successful experience is one that allows every employee to go into their workstation and securely and seamlessly access to all of their applications. When employees only have to remember one password for all devices and applications, it saves time and headaches. Transforming your Digital Workspace for employee expectations around Day One onboarding and productivity, device deployment, and password management is a fundamental shift in how we manage IT’s involvement in the workplace. The outcome is higher employee satisfaction and retention from Day One.
And lest you think this is something you can push to the wayside, consider the cost associated with losing and then replacing unhappy employees by not providing them with the technologies and experiences they desire. A 2017 employee retention report conducted by Work Institute found that companies spend as much as 33% of an employee’s annual salary just to replace staff. This impacts a company’s bottom line. On the other hand, investing in the employee experience creates happy, satisfied and engaged employees, and improves a company’s bottom line.
