Digital Investments So Close Yet So Far From Home
COVID has shaped the way we approach our lives. We have learned to rely more on the digital aspects to help us through, especially in the peak of the pandemic. Companies are now moving towards a hybrid work model for their employees, making it a big trend.
What is a hybrid work model? It allows employees to do a combination of work from home and work from office. Some argue this creates a better work-life balance, and some feel it is more withdrawn and you end up working longer hours at home. I personally had both good and bad experience with the hybrid model. On one hand, being able to adjust my schedules to going to work on days that worked best for me based on meetings and other commitments allowed for some flexibility. On the other hand, I often felt that the days I was home, I was working longer hours. Work-life balance seemed to take a hit. One would think that eliminating commuting time would give you more time back for yourself.
We can see in the chart below, not being able to unplug, loneliness, and working more are some of the biggest reasons why there is struggle with working remotely.
How then can companies strike that balance and take care of these struggles?
The answer: Digital Employee Experiences with a twist.
Digital Employee Experience is more important now than it was 2 years ago. It is an employee’s experience with work technology. Who would want technology issues during a major client meeting or not be able to access messaging to get the work done?
But when we talk about Digital Employee Experience, I would go one step further and say the inclusiveness and employee community is an important part of that experience. The pandemic has forced people to seek out companies that have better work hour flexibility and make you feel a part of the company.
When looking into Digital Employee Experience and what potential investments would be promising, I would look at how that company’s DEX sets the tone for employees to have a good experience and how that DEX helps with retention. Companies are fixated on creating robust technologies to scale and allow for work from home, but are they factoring in how those technologies may impact the employees?
This article that I came across has summed up the issue perfectly. Caitlin Turay has identified 8 ways to use technology in a positive way to make sure it doesn’t negatively impact employees. The idea is to not eliminate the technology, but rather to use it more wisely and efficiently for the benefit of both the company AND the employees.
For example, digitizing the onboarding process is what employees see first when joining a company. By making that fully integrated with the workplace and creating a smooth process, it sets a positive tone to begin the job.
Another aspect of expanding this digital experience is work-life balance. Employee hours are an easy data point to collect through a database. Companies and managers should then use this information to ensure employees are working reasonable hours and taking the time off they need. Oftentimes companies just leave it to the judgment of employees and managers. By ensuring, from higher up, that work-life balance is taken seriously, using data, employees will feel more motivated. This is more important during the pandemic, where people may be working longer hours.
Digital Employee Experience also incorporates having technologies for communication across the firm. But how does that technology help when the company won’t actively use it to keep an open and transparent line of communication?
From what I have seen, companies are spending large amounts of money on various technologies to improve Digital Employee Experience, but they stop there. They don’t then use those technologies to improve motivation and a sense of community.
We have gotten to a point where “technology” and “digitization” are just buzz words. Everyone is acting on it, but not all are understanding the repercussions of just letting technology do the work. There is a human aspect to digitization that is missing the mark and too many technologies may end up harming employee productivity. It reminds me of the AI/ML trend, where many companies wanted to do it for the sake of doing it, even if it didn’t have a proper use case. It wasted time and money.
On average, companies that have successfully combined digital and people would most likely see higher retention rates and higher motivation. These investments may prove more worthwhile because ultimately a company is nothing without its employees.
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