What is the relationship between technology and work-life balance? Is work well-being considered in the choice of digital technology? The results of recent research.
In the era of hybrid work, technology has a direct impact on employee morale, work-life balance and productivity.
This is according to data from a recent global survey conducted by Ivanti: it is not so much the workplace that affects work well-being, but the experience people have when interacting with technology.
The survey, which involved 10.000 employees, IT managers and executives, found that almost half of employees (49 per cent) think their organisation does not equip them with appropriate technologies and tools. This causes them frustration and in 64 per cent of cases is detrimental to morale.
In fact, 26 per cent of them are thinking of quitting their jobs for this very reason: the lack of attention paid to this issue by companies is a contributing factor to Great Resignation. Yet, on the agenda of business leaders, the quality of the working environment and employee satisfaction are not high on the list of priorities, while increasing productivity is.
What C-Levels don't realise is that productivity and digital experience are closely related: 65 per cent of respondents believe they would be more productive if they had better technology at their disposal and 42 per cent have spent money to buy better tools for this purpose.
It seems that this is not fully understood even by those in charge of making the Everywhere Workplace work: only 21 per cent of IT managers evaluate the end-user experience before choosing new tools.
Work-life balance and digital: what obstacles
Yet, productivity improvements linked to the digital employee experience help retain talent, reduce operating costs and improve corporate profitability. By now, hybrid working has become the norm: only 13 per cent of employees prefer to work exclusively from the office.
So how come it is not a priority in boards of directors and IT teams are not ready to become strategic leaders in their organisation to realise it? There may be several reasons:
- IT teams are the first to lack adequate technology
The increasing variety of devices, networks, infrastructures and IT services used for hybrid work has greatly expanded the inventory of resources that IT teams must manage. Yet 32 per cent of IT professionals still use spreadsheets to keep track of these resources!
With one-third of professionals manually logging and acting on every single device, and nearly half (47 per cent) of them claiming an inability to have visibility into every device attempting to access corporate resources, there is no way to gain control and scale.
Configurations, updates, application of security measures, operations take place in a fragmented manner, with a heavy impact on security and people's experience.
- difficulties in reconciling digital experience and security
Users would love to have a seamless experience, switching from one device to another according to their needs, but it is difficult for IT leaders to maintain robust security at the same time. At least half of them receive pressure from above to continuously equip their systems with more stringent security measures.
Cumbersome and repetitive verification procedures can waste time. Sometimes unnecessarily, if they are based on outdated verification systems such as the password.
- inability to measure DEX requirements
A good digital experience is based on three determining factors: productivity, safety and service. We also talked about it here: there is an inability on the part of IT teams to relate the data that we can get from the millions of devices connected to the network and corporate resources every day.
There are aspects that are taken care of by different people: device operation, security management, service desk. But the lived experience is only one and it is penalised in interdependent ways: ineffective configurations may impact security, proactive detection of an anomaly may prevent the user from seeking help from support, and so on.
Aggregating this information in easily searchable measurement systems, would also increase the scalability of IT teams: detection of potential problems, according to a scale of priority and urgency, would allow intervention actions to be codified and automated with the support of AI and bots.
The bottom line: win-win between companies and employees
Work-life balance and wellbeing at work are key to increasing productivity.
Agile working means being able to customise and make flexible their work experience. On a practical level, it translates into being able to interact with the company via secure digital services from any device available at any place at any time.
At the same time, companies must be able to measure the productivity of their employees by means of objective indicators regardless of time and place the performance.
Start with the Digital Experience Score, i.e. the evaluation of employees' experience through devices, operating systems and applications used, it would make it possible to identify which elements contribute to increasing people's productivity with objective and irrefutable metrics.
