In the age of the “war for talent,” it’s more important than ever to gain competitive advantage by reinventing the employee experience. Workers want to be engaged in their workplace and feel that their companies value them. That means businesses need to create a modern workplace that proves they do.
Those that fail to transform the workplace are at risk of losing some of their best employees. That’s troubling, as Gallup reports that employee engagement in the US dropped from 36 percent in 2020 to 32 percent in 2022. Eighteen percent are actively disengaged. Globally, only 21 percent are engaged, below the 2019 peak.
Creating positive employee experiences
Companies can leverage operational and employee experience data — their sentiment about the technology they use, for example — for quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Research from experience management company Qualtrics shows that employees’ technology experience is playing a larger role in the overall employee experience, particularly as the digital workplace evolves. Over 90 percent of CIOs believe the IT experience is important when it comes to attracting and retaining talent and building corporate culture.
Qualtrics and Microsoft worked together to quantify the benefits that can arise when employees have an optimum technology setup, such as minimized downtime. The results of their study speak to how impactful the technology experience is on the employee experience. Employers that had transformed the modern workplace saw a 15-point increase in employee engagement. The associated Net Promoter Score (NPS) was calculated to increase by 70 points.
A major highlight: Individuals who felt they had an agile and responsive PC experience were 121 percent more likely to say they feel valued by their company.
DXC, Qualtrics and Microsoft are bringing results like these to life. We’re pairing our DXC Modern Workplace solution, powered by DXC UPtimeTM, that creates a personalized and consumer-like workplace experience — including self-service access to ordering devices and equipment, digital IT support and asset management services, and intelligent collaboration — with Qualtrics’ EmployeeXM™ solution for gathering continuous feedback from employees that can impact engagement, talent planning, productivity and innovation.
We’ll be integrating the operational data we capture on service delivery and our employee sentiment data with Qualtrics’ experience data into our Modern Workplace solution to enable next-level employee experiences — fewer hassles, less downtime, greater productivity, stronger employee-employer relationships. DXC also is integrating operational data about group working patterns from Microsoft Viva, which brings to the table information that helps understand factors affecting employee well-being.
CIOs and CHROs team up
The digital work experience has changed dramatically since the pandemic, and accordingly CIO and senior IT leadership roles have shifted too. Eighty-five percent of CIOs said they now collaborate with the CHRO in their organization more than they did before the pandemic.
These partnerships will strengthen as CIOs and CHROs together work their way through new territories — chief among them keeping connections, collaboration and engagement strong in what for many will be a hybrid workforce model. In a hybrid environment, employees that continue to work at home need to see “inclusion at scale.” Remote employees shouldn’t feel steps removed from the workplace experience, such that they wind up in positions where they feel they can’t effectively propose ideas, innovate with colleagues and be considered integral members of their teams.
The CIO and CHRO have a great opportunity to be intentional about the kinds of working patterns they want to drive for the hybrid workplace, and what tools to create, build or buy to support their goals. It’s likely that some companies’ top employees and job candidates will want to operate remotely, at least part of the time, and they need to feel comfortable that their employer is thoughtfully accommodating their needs. At DXC, for example, our IT and HR leaders are engaged in using our Modern Workplace solution to gain better insight into our employees’ experience, no matter where they reside.
Providing augmented, immersive virtual workplace experiences — including virtual reality and mixed reality — is one way to support new ways of working and connecting. Virtual office technology, for instance, can replace those small but meaningful chats at the water cooler, providing employees a way to casually connect with colleagues online and build trust from there. Operational and experience data can be critical to improving hybrid collaborations too. In one case, a company dug into its experience data and found that remote workers who were less engaged didn’t have access to digital whiteboards, and so felt excluded from conversations during meetings hosted in the company’s offices – a situation it immediately addressed.
The bottom line: People want to work for an organization that gives them the employee experience they want with the tools they need to do their best work. Do that, and you will be the employer of choice, primed to win the war for talent.
Learn more about rethinking where and how we work by watching DXC’s TechTalk, Modern Workplace: Enabling Next-level Employee Experience, featuring myself, Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ President of Products and Services, and researcher Caitlin E McDonald, PhD.
Learn more about DXC Modern Workplace.
Mike McDaniel is a global lead for DXC Technology. Mike has substantial experience in general management, technology engineering, business and operations. He holds an MBA from Bowling Green State University and a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Toldeo, and sits on the Board of Directors for the Valley of the Sun YMCA. Connect with him on LinkedIn.