A5

The role of IT in the employee experience

For a long time, companies have put the “customer experience” at the heart of everything they do. While it should certainly be at the center, there’s another side to that coin—the employee experience. In fact, the employee experience is quickly being deemed the new customer experience due to its impact on customer satisfaction, employee productivity and retention, and business profitability. According to MIT research, businesses that scored in the top quartile on employee experience have double the customer satisfaction and 25% greater profitability than competitors, compared to companies in the bottom quartile. Many businesses, however, are struggling to keep employee engagement and productivity high, especially amid the global pandemic. According to Gallup, 80% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, costing the global economy US$8.1 trillion in lost productivity each year. Every leader—including the CIO—needs to put energy behind tackling this growing challenge. Below are four ways IT leaders can help drive greater employee engagement and productivity.

©2021 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights) | CCPA Do Not Sell My Information Fortune may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. Quotes delayed at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Interactive Data. ETF and Mutual Fund data provided by Morningstar, Inc. Dow Jones Terms & Conditions: S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Terms & Conditions. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions. | EU Data Subject Requests

Collaboration has to be part of IT’s job today. There is often no inherent obligation for teams to approach IT when evaluating new technology solutions that are critical to completing their work objectives. It’s why we saw the rise of what has come to be known as “shadow IT” and why it continues to be pervasive. Teams are either unaware of the value IT can provide or—more often than not—think of IT as the organization of “no” that will simply slow them down. Given IT leaders aren’t always an integral part of business discussions, they must strive to build stronger relationships across departments and earn an invitation to have a seat at the table. This involves proactive listening tours and stakeholder meetings to stay on top of evolving business objectives. Another approach is to set up meet and greets when new leaders join. Getting on someone’s calendar early is helpful in learning their goals and discovering where IT can help solve pain points. The most important thing IT provides to all parts of the business is the highest level of customer service and enablement support. At the same time, IT also has a secondary focus to anticipate the needs of the business and stay ahead of them. It’s all about understanding what the leader’s vision is for their team or department and adding value. In being proactive, IT leaders can uncover what teams need to be successful and partner with them to find better—and more efficient—ways to meet their goals.

1. Build proactive relationships with business counterparts

Today, it’s so easy for people to self-serve in the world of technology. This wasn’t the case 20 years ago when IT provided the technology and employees merely consumed it. Cut to the present day and people enter a new position with a clear idea of what technology they want to use. While IT would love to be in a position where they could give every person every tool they want, it’s a huge hindrance on productivity and cross-team collaboration. According to Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, people switch on average between 10 apps 25 times per day to do their work. As a result of app switching, one quarter (27%) of workers say that actions and messages are missed. And according to Accenture research, 75% of companies are struggling to collaborate across different business functions, with executives expecting a 6.3% increase in costs as a result of redundant investments in digital projects. When too many applications and tools get deployed—especially when they perform similar functions—it becomes increasingly difficult to work efficiently and collaboratively. IT’s goal should be to deploy as few tools as possible to help employees focus and collaborate cross-functionally. When IT leaders build strong relationships within the business, they are in a unique bird’s eye position to connect the dots and aggregate technology needs across departments. When IT can rally the business around a single standard approach with executive buy-in, it creates an environment where employees are more productive and engaged. For example, most companies don’t implement 14 different chat tools just because certain people are more familiar with certain ones. They standardize on a tool like Slack, because it makes it easy for people to collaborate. The same thought and attention should go into standardizing on one work management platform, because it will make it easier for employees to get work done efficiently together. By fostering a culture of clarity—and implementing one system to manage work—teams can align on who is doing what, by when, and why.

2. Standardize on tools that make cross-team collaboration easier

explore

A top barrier to productivity is having too much work to do, according to respondents of the Anatomy of Work Index. And with limited bandwidth available for the most important work, over one-quarter (26%) of deadlines are missed each week. To help lighten team workloads and prevent critical work from falling through the cracks, IT should actively look to automate manual work and empower employees to self-serve. The benefits of work automation and self service are experienced by both the wider business and the internal IT staff. For example, the wider business will benefit when employees need to download applications to do their jobs or access in-office printers. In these scenarios, IT can set up a self-service functionality for employees to execute the work on their own timeline—which also frees up IT’s time to execute on more strategic work. In addition, by automating manual processes, IT can free up more of its time to focus on strategic, challenging work. No IT leader wants their staff manually entering data into 20 different systems just to onboard one employee. This leads to low employee engagement and team retention. Instead, all employees—including IT staff—should focus on interesting and rewarding projects.

3. Automate business processes and empower employees to self-serve

It’s easy for people in IT to get wrapped up in servicing the “customer”—which for IT is the broader employee base. However, IT leaders shouldn’t lose sight of their own team’s engagement, productivity, and happiness—especially given burnout is on the rise. To drive greater employee engagement, leaders should empower every team member to connect their work directly to the company’s purpose and mission. This helps ensure strategic, interesting work is being prioritized, while removing or deprioritizing less impactful work. According to Gallup, employees who have the opportunity to do what they do best are 57% less likely to experience burnout. In addition, IT leaders should help protect their team from manual work that could be automated as well as unreasonable SLAs from the business. Without clear boundaries and a clear framework for what it takes to get the work done, many will assume IT can solve anything last minute. That too, however, will lead to low staff morale and low work quality. As a leader, it’s critically important to avoid treating employees as robots and, instead, to place constant attention on where they want to take their careers, what motivates them to do their best work, and how you can help them achieve their goals.

4. Focus heavily on your own team’s engagement

The role of IT is no longer just a technology provider. It also involves being a strong business partner—engaging regularly with all departments to anticipate needs, finding new ways to make cross-team collaboration easier, automating manual processes for greater efficiency, and focusing inward on self improvement. As IT leaders, our job is to help the wider business and our own staff be creative, innovative, and collaborative—no matter what changes and challenges come our way. Because with an engaged and motivated workforce, businesses can accomplish just about anything. Learn how Asana Enterprise can help your organization align, adapt, and scale with confidence.

Closing thoughts

Note: This article was created by Asana.

This article is written by Johan Dowdy, Global Head of IT at Asana.

explore

Note: This article was created by Asana.