The New Future of Work is Employee Centric

When we resorted to remote working in 2020, we believed it to be a short-time fad brought on by sheer necessity. Now, from the poorly planned work-from-home strategies of two years ago to the thriving hybrid work model that has recently emerged, the way we work has gone through a swift evolution.

The first couple of years post-pandemic focused on workplace digitization to ensure a secure and collaborative means of working. From 2020 to the end of 2022, the will-we-won’t-we tug-of-war between remote/hybrid working and return to office kept the business world focused primarily on employee productivity.

But it’s 2023 now, and this focus too, seems to have shifted. For the first time since the five-day working week was implemented due to the growing unrest among the labor force almost a century before, employee requirements have become the driving force behind deciding the future of work.

What’s New in Today’s Digital Workplace?

Enhancing employee experience through a human-centric digital workplace is the talk of the town since the beginning of the new year. In fact, The Future of Work 2023 Report by Infosys says that from 2022 to 2024, businesses have been focusing on automation, and adoption of digital tools to create a digital workplace in an effort to foster a human-centric culture.

The report says that an overwhelming 73% of senior executives and managers surveyed said that flexible and remote workplaces will grow in the future and 41% of the companies said they are planning to increase remote working hires in the next 2 years.

In the last 2 years, we saw that remote working improves talent onboarding since the blurring of geographical boundaries brings more employee flexibility. And the hybrid model does wonders with employee retention. This is one of the main reasons why Forrester Predictions 2023 warns leaders that forcing employees back to the office will meet with “disastrous results”. It says that undoing hybrid and remote working will result in a loss of productivity.

Set against this context, organizations are faced with the most obvious choice – adopt digital workplace technologies with the goal to improve employee experience.

Digital Workplace Technologies that Improve Employee Experience

The Gartner 2023-2024 Tech Adoption Roadmap for Infrastructure & Operations says that there will be a 14% increase in the adoption of digital workplace technologies from the period 2021-2023 to 2022-2024. This increase will be driven primarily by the need to ensure a great digital employee experience.

The Gartner report validates this rise in percentage with some employee experience statistics. Employees expressing satisfaction are 60% more likely to stay with the organization and are 69% more likely to be high performers.

This data becomes even more crucial in the face of one of today’s biggest business challenges – scarcity in talent, an aspect we discussed in detailed in one of our recent whitepapers.

Among the digital workplace technologies already deployed by organizations, Gartner says, 60% improves speed and agility, and 40% enhances employee experience.

It also says, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is already a favorite among CIOs and IT decision-makers as it is a high value, low risk technology.

How DaaS Enhances Digital Employee Experience

With employee experience being a critical factor for business success, it is a priority for organizations to invest in digital workplace technologies like DaaS, which invariably provides a high return on investments.

DaaS addresses employee experience challenges in many ways, from providing remote access to business applications to ensuring minimum downtime. With DaaS, employees get the support to remain productive without loss in effort or time, without the risk of data breach or loss.

A few ways that DaaS empowers employees:

• Onsite and offsite employees are constantly connected to the virtual infrastructure because DaaS enables working from anywhere.
• By providing a virtual workplace on even their personal devices, DaaS ensures that any personal applications installed on the device are well and truly separated from critical business applications.
• The IT team can monitor all virtual machines from anywhere and perform software updates and maintenance remotely, which means that employees don’t lose time waiting for IT support.
• If any device the employee is working on malfunctions or become inaccessible, all they have to do is switch to another device. Their data and applications are device agnostic, and thus, accessible from anywhere.
• Employees do not have to worry about corporate data theft or loss even if their device gets stolen. DaaS comes with concrete security, and nothing is saved locally.

(Learn more from our COO, Maneesh Raina, as he explores in detail how DaaS ensures great end user experience.)

The future of work is employee centric. As we make the shift to a human-centric digital workplace that is driven largely by employee expectations, organizations must realign their IT strategies with a fresh perspective. The workplace of the future is not about numbers but more about experiences. And with digital workplace technologies like DaaS, which provides the ideal infrastructure for seamless operations, organizations can ensure that these experiences are both meaningful and repeatable.