Enterprises across the globe have experienced common challenges as the pandemic effectively rewrote the rulebook, spurring widespread adoption of remote and hybrid working models and processes nearly overnight. Operationalizing that change was business-critical, but its impact continues to ripple outward.
Getting better outcomes from our workplaces depends on how seriously organizations approach the current productivity conundrum. Incentivizing active engagement requires empathy for the daily challenges employees face. As departments address unique technological needs, they must apply that same agility and adaptability on the more human side of work.
Embracing new technology is key for any business today, but treating the workforce as a resource, instead of a group of individual people with unique needs and experiences is a disservice to employees. The use of technology enhances processes, but diving deeper to understand wants and needs across an organization will serve leaders of all levels. The future of work rests on a company’s ability to build customized interventions when an employee veers off track and how they can further incorporate balance into their infrastructure.
Realigning remote models to renew employee experience
Managers require different skills to manage remote and hybrid teams effectively, making learning and unlearning as steep a climb for them as for their team members. Organizations now expect their managers to possess soft and hard skills, with a strong focus on communication, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Enterprises and managers must focus equally on our gathering spaces and the intangible aspects of work, such as monitoring employees and tracking their performance, maintaining relationships, and enhancing the managerial ability to lead remote teams.
Digitization and automation will help business leaders better manage and sustain remote teams. But, beyond that, focusing on aligning expectations between employees and leadership will clarify how best remote and hybrid offices can prioritize employee well-being—a process that remains work-in-progress. It requires a complete tweak of the messaging. Digitization can be streamlined with platforms like an AI-powered professional services automation (PSA) tool. An enterprise-level workforce management tool can help to automate mundane tasks, freeing employees to take up more business-critical and rewarding tasks.
Remote work has shone a bright light on something every person values more than anything: their time. When employers roll out a solution that can start to give that time back, employee mental health skyrockets along with productivity. Enterprises must relay that digitization and automation are enablers and not all-pervasive, all-seeing entities institutionalized to compensate for the lack of in-person supervision.
Decoding the data dilemma
Ongoing automation and digitization initiatives allow organizations to collect vast amounts of data. Unfortunately, this has also led to a splintering within the workplace, one that sees employees toggling through various apps throughout the day, distributing their data along with them. Many approaches management teams take lead to further entrenchment of disparate systems, where enterprise resource planning tools, HR systems, payroll software, and the like hold different versions of the same information. These silos, and the configuration that enables their creation, impede decision-making processes, leaving employees lost and overwhelmed.
Employees already use many apps and tools, and managers struggle to accurately account for the time their teams take to complete various projects and tasks. Besides that, teams seldom have access to tools that provide a single source of truth across an organization that enables the kind of decision-making required to improve overall results.
This underlines the ever-evolving nature of the problems enterprises must address in the era of digital work. How businesses and leaders move to reconcile disparate systems is dependent upon their willingness to try new approaches. If your current process leaves you uncertain about the reliability of your data, definitive steps must be taken to establish access to consistent, real-time, and reliable information.
Sit down with stakeholders across the organization, from IT to human resources to client-facing capacities and beyond, to determine employees’ pain points. This unified approach can help enterprises cut through the ambiguity of muddled data, boost employee engagement, and ultimately set the business on a course to profitability.
Global challenges require individualized solutions
Enterprises across the globe have experienced common challenges as the pandemic effectively rewrote the rulebook, spurring widespread adoption of remote and hybrid working models and processes nearly overnight. Operationalizing that change was business-critical, but its impact continues to ripple outward. Employees faced tremendous stress and burnout as they juggled personal and professional responsibilities.
It’s no wonder workplace stress peaked, and employee productivity hit a low in 2022. Only 21% of the global workforce identified as being actively engaged, and stress levels reached an all-time high of 44%, surpassing 2021 figures when the pandemic peaked. What’s become clear is businesses need to identify additional ways of raising morale.
Lakshmi Raj is co-CEO of Replicon
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Lakshmi Raj