29 Apr 2023
by Dean Young

The future of work is here – but who’s in the driver’s seat?

NTT Data UK's Dean Young explores the three Ws: work, the workforce and workspaces.

A year ago, everyone was wondering what the new office normal would look like. The verdict is in: people really like working remotely – at least part of the time. What’s less clear is the impact of hybrid working on team efficiency, productivity, cohesion and collaboration.

Most people seem to agree that more flexibility in working arrangements is a good thing, but there are still thorny questions to be answered about execution and structure. 

Is it as simple as just saying yes to working from home more frequently? How are the mores of the new workplace afecting motivation and morale? What new policies or processes are needed to ensure, for example, that teamwork doesn’t suffer?

The answers might help to explain why interest in employee experience (EX) – improving the way employees feel about the organisations they work for – is surging. Research from NTT on the global workplace has found that 90.6% of organisations say they recognise the value of EX as a strategic differentiator.

This suggests a rebalancing is underway, which arguably hands employees more power. While this is true to an extent, it doesn’t mean business leaders have to relinquish all control.

What does Employee Experience (EX) mean?

EX captures the way employees perceive their employer and the environment in which they work. It’s shaped by the myriad interactions they have with customers, business leaders and colleagues. The policies and processes to which they must adhere, and the tools and technologies they use, can also affect EX.

Improving EX can deliver tangible results in terms of work–life balance and employee wellness, with knock-on positives for productivity and business growth. The NTT research has also found that organisations with optimised workplace strategies are far more satisfied with their current EX capability.

Yet, despite the shift to more flexible working arrangements, many organisations are still struggling with employee burnout. Nearly two-thirds of business leaders say employee wellbeing levels have deteriorated since the start of the pandemic.

While many say workplace support systems have improved in the past two years, employee sentiment tells a different story. Only 23.1% of employees say they’re very happy working for their current employer.

How are business leaders adapting?

Strategies for the hybrid workplace are still evolving within many organisations, and a great deal of uncertainty remains.

The NTT research shows that just 54% of organisations have a clearly defined strategy for the future workplace. The common challenge is balancing changing employee preferences and workstyles with the need to improve organisational agility.

Those organisations that identify strongly as leaders or industry disruptors are much more likely to have defined their future workplace strategies (63.8% and 68.1%, respectively) than traditional enterprises.

Consider the example of Henkel, the German chemical and consumer-goods company. As part of their digital transformation strategy, Henkel decided to migrate their legacy telephony environment to Microsoft telephony. Working with NTT, they replaced their existing telephony environment with Skype for Business, then relied on our expertise to migrate to a full-cloud telephony solution with Microsoft Teams.

This enabled their teams to remain productive and connected during COVID-19 restrictions and formed the basis of consolidating their collaboration and communication tools on Microsoft Teams.

What do employees want now?

Better data collection and analytics are essential to understanding what employees want from the hybrid workplace.

Analysing data by location, department and role can deliver better employee insights. But before that process starts, business leaders need to understand how their organisations are capturing, segmenting and articulating their data.

Best practices in using data to improve EX focus on the three Ws: work, the workforce and workspaces. Measuring how employees react to their technology tools, processes, policies and physical conditions within these categories can provide the insight that business leaders need to make changes and improvements that matter to employees.

It’s hard to deny that having so many people upend the work habits of a lifetime has had a profound social impact – one that continues to ripple across the world’s economies. The shift to remote working accelerated digital transformation in the workplace, changing how colleagues collaborate and how managers manage.

The challenge is now to understand exactly how things have been altered.

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