For each of the past three years, Forrester has fielded a survey to 14,000 people in the global workforce to take a different look at employee engagement. The results are designed to reshape the way we think about technology in employees’ working lives, writes David Johnson, Principal Analyst, Forrester.
Nine years ago, I started noticing a pattern in the conversations I was having with Forrester clients. I was talking mostly with senior IT people responsible for employee-facing technologies in large organizations, and at that time, most of them were grappling with how to achieve tighter security and compliance with the devices and apps in their portfolios. They knew that there would be implications for employee engagement, but they had no research or data to know how much. What they needed most was fact-based research they could use to change the conversation with other stakeholders, and to insist that any new measures would be implemented in more thoughtful ways that wouldn’t impede employees’ daily work and autonomy.
At the same time, intriguing new research was being done by scientists to understand the circumstances under which people will engage fully in their work, and reach a state known as “flow.†I interviewed many of these scientists and learned that when people can reach flow, they are many times more productive than people who can’t regulate their attention as well. I also learned that technology-induced distractions were becoming a more frequent inhibitor to flow, so with the help of colleagues, we designed a survey to help us better understand the relationship between technology and engagement.
Forrester’s EX Index Reveals How Technology Satisfaction Relates to Employee Engagement
Accordingly, each year since 2017, Forrester has surveyed approximately 14,000 information workers in the global workforce to better understand what leads to engagement and flow at work, and how it affects key business outcomes. Our survey is different, but also complementary to other well-known engagement surveys, as it looks much more closely at enabling factors such as how different technologies and technology policies affect engagement.
The top three predictors of engagement in this year’s survey are recent opportunities to advance at work, autonomy, and recent recognition or praise from their manager. But the fourth – that their company provides a good environment to be productive – stands out, because it points to the role of technology. We looked specifically at how strongly satisfaction with different technologies relates to engagement, and the strongest is satisfaction with collaboration technology, followed by feeling satisfied that they have access to the information that they need to be productive (see Figure 1).
What inspires us most about this data is that it so clearly supports the hypothesis we started with, specifically that technology plays a crucial role in engagement at work. We learned from the science of flow that one of the key requirements for people to be able to sustain flow is easy access to task-critical information. This explains why both satisfaction with collaboration technology and having access to the information that they need top the list in our analysis.
Learn More: How Employee Engagement Analytics can Impact Work-CultureOpens a new window
The Technology Organization Is More Vital Than Ever
What this means is that CIOs and their organizations play a vital role in EX initiatives, because they are in a unique position to ensure that the technology environment employees are working with can help employees reach and sustain flow in their work. And in fact, that’s what we’re starting to see with some of our largest clients – especially in heavily regulated industries such as financial services, where efforts to achieve tight security regulatory complianceOpens a new window have made it more difficult for employees to stay engaged in their work, and more likely to leave their organizations as well.
We’re seeing more organizations taking a serious look at this through the lens of brain-based research. For example, a large U.S.-based bank is evaluating their employee-facing technology to better understand how difficult it is to get daily work done for their employees. They’re looking at things like the cognitive effort needed to initiate work tasks, finding information, etc., and targeting any friction points they find, for improvement.
The opportunity for you as an HR leader is to help your organization become a better, more engaging place to work by using the research and data now available to you, to change the conversation around employee engagement, drawing attention to the vital role of technology in employees’ working lives. As part of that, help HR leaders shift their focus toward employees’ daily journeys in their work.
How do you think different technologies and technology policies affect employee engagement? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .