When the business world had to shift to remote work suddenly, it seemed like a mammoth task. Data is now showing the reason it turned out to be an enormous effort. A survey by 1E, an endpoint management platform that supports the work-from-anywhere enterprise, found that remote workers faced a significant productivity dip because as many as 49 million of them had to wait hours, days, and even weeks for IT teams to fix issues. 18 million could not work at all due to service desk disruption.
The pandemic has exposed the biggest loophole that exists in organizations today – the right level of technology to support a growing remote workforce. The employee’s digital experience has been left with several gap areas ever since the work-from-home approach was initiated. The survey also shares how IT teams are currently over-burdened and also saddled with old tools that are not optimal for the new work setup. 53% of employees who were surveyed shared that their device performed slower outside the office. 48% said that this was a top-three issue that slowed down their productivity and overall employee experienceOpens a new window .
Apart from a drop in productivity and experience, the safety of data during remote work is also emerging as a point of concern. Security and software positioning are also seen as the major challenges that IT teams are struggling to handle, as per the research.
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Are Organizations Actively Looking for Solutions to Address the Two Missing Pieces – Security and Employee Experience?
“The fact that 74% of employees are facing repeat issues proves that a lack of automation doesn’t just impact the employee experience, but further burdens the service desk and holds organizations back from creating meaningful value and growth,†comments Paul Hardy, evangelist, chief innovation office, at ServiceNow. “The reality is that COVID has ripped up the enterprise IT book, and it’s time to use research such as this to rewrite the norm.â€
While organizations identify these issues, some solutions are entering the market to address both these areas.
Employee experience
Deloitte and ServiceNowOpens a new window have partnered to strengthen the HR service delivery platform such that HR teams are free to focus on strategic aspects of their roles such as employee engagementOpens a new window . For employees, it is an easier and quicker way to find responses to their queries as well as follow the structured workflows within the platform to manage their work more productively. To meet the same need, Hibob has partnered with Microsoft TeamsOpens a new window to ensure higher levels of employee productivity, inclusivity, engagement, and information sharing.
Just like the 1E survey did, collecting and then assessing experience-related data is essential for data-backed decision-making. For example, Rizing and SAP®Opens a new window partnered a little over a month ago to launch Rizing Employee Experience Insights (EXI). The purpose is to enable organizations to use data and experience-related insights to change their business as well as people processes.
Data security
Cybersecurity has become a massive issue for companies. For example, OpenVPNOpens a new window conducted a study that shared that 90% of IT professionals believed that remote workers do not follow secure practices. This is because each remote worker works on a different network, which may not be secure, and hence exposes gaps in virtual security. Similarly, 69% of organizationsOpens a new window are concerned about security risks that can impact corporate data due to working from home, according to the 2020 Work-From-Home Cybersecurity Report. Such information shows the gaps that need to be plugged.
There are various steps that organizations need to take, starting with training their employees to understand and mitigate the security risks. For example, many might need to be sensitized on how to use two-factor authenticationOpens a new window (2FA). Planning for the right security software on their personal devices and informing them that these are in place for monitoring and safety reasons is an essential step in educating the employees.
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There may be a lot of benefits of switching to permanent remote work. Still, unless employee experience in this shift is not prioritized and cybersecurity best practices are not implemented, these measures may not prove useful to either employees or the company. Company data is likely to be accessed through personal devices increasingly in the future. Planning for this situation needs to start now with the right compliance and cybersecurity policies.
Several solutions are available for employers to resolve these needs. Whether they use them efficiently is another question, the answer to which is still to be found.
“The majority of people (74%) are feeling disconnected from their colleagues. They are relying on their laptop not just for work, but also for collaboration and professional human contact (virtual). When their laptop is slow, like most are finding, then everything suffers. If they have a serious problem, the majority (72%) have to wait hours, days or even weeks for it to be resolved. In that time, most suffer disruption and a quarter simply cannot work or collaborate at all. This will have an impact on their productivity and will generate considerable stress. If working from anywhere is to become the new normal then IT must empathize with the employee and solve these new issues.†– Sumir Karayi, founder & CEO, 1E.
Note: 1E surveyed employees across eight industries in the United States to collect this data in partnership with research agency Vanson Bourne.