Unlocking efficient hybrid working

Eimear Gunn at Kyndryl explains how the roadmap for enabling success with a hybrid work model is buried in workplace data

 

In a post-pandemic era, with business costs skyrocketing and employee expectations evolving, businesses are facing an unavoidable period of rewiring. Although 40% of companies in the UK shifted to a hybrid working model at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 4 in 10 Londoners are currently working on a hybrid basis, organisations are still figuring out how they manage their workforce post-pandemic.

 

While many employees are not willing  to let go of the flexibility that remote working allows, business leaders are actively encouraging employees to return to the office. Along with the desire to build company culture back up to pre-pandemic levels, much of these return-to-office mandates are motivated by the less-than-optimal success rate of collaboration tools and remote technology deployed in 2020.

 

Many of these investments have yielded diminishing returns in terms of employee productivity and engagement, ultimately impacting the business’ bottom line.

 

Shining a light on employee experience

To continue to optimise the working experience, and to ensure that organisations have ways of measuring and demonstrating success which are fit for purpose, employee experience must come to the forefront.

 

With employees at the front line of operations, they are often the first to know when technologies go wrong and how events can snowball throughout the business. When implementing flexible, hybrid working-ready technology infrastructure, employees are also the first to know if remote tools are succeeding.

 

Employees have a better view of whether business initiatives are delivering for the wider community, meeting ESG initiatives, and building a more ethically aware company – all factors that are growing in importance for organisations in 2023.

 

Building a clear roadmap for hybrid working success is vital – and the answer to this lies in data. While enterprise data valuation traditionally places greater emphasis and ROI on customer, financial, and IT data insights, building data assets that have the most measurable impact on an organisation relies on using workplace data.

 

Employing workplace data

One way of using workplace data to smooth the transition to hybrid working is by taking a look at some of the business’s historical or overlooked data and integrating it with modern systems.

 

Whether it be virtual agents, phone systems, app performance, or availability data, integrating these under-used sources of data into existing IT management tools is an effective way of reducing device management and support costs, as well as boosting employee productivity.

 

Another step in evolving the measurement and management of IT operations is recognising the drawbacks of Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). SLAs define the level of service expected by a customer from a supplier, specifying the metrics by which the service will be measured, and any remedies or penalties that will be applied should the service levels not be achieved.

 

SLAs usually consider the performance, response times, availability (including uptime and downtime), service hours, and support expected. As well as ensuring that both the service provider and the user are consistent in their goal and processes, SLAs set clear expectations and baselines, keeping both parties accountable and making it easier to measure both failure and success.

 

However, despite being widely used within businesses, SLAs are becoming an outdated metric. Organisations need metrics that more closely reflect the realities of their IT department, and this means truly understanding IT from an employee perspective, focusing on the Employee Experience and business outcome.

 

The case for XLAs

For businesses that are evolving past SLAs, there are ways to tease meaningful insights out of multiple data sources to empower businesses to enforce minimum performance levels. Known as Experience-Level Agreements (XLAs) and Experience Performance Indicators, these measurements focus on the outcomes and value of a service, rather than simply including judicial agreements on measures.

 

This enables businesses to effectively measure their end-user outcomes against business performance and better mitigate any poor user experiences that have an effect on wider business productivity, whether that be widespread technology crashes, slow response times, or incompatibility with legacy operating systems.

 

While SLAs don’t convey how IT is performing from the perspectives of employees or the wider business, XLAs are user-centric, giving organisations a better understanding of their employees’ opinions of workplace technology and IT support, which helps to streamline the transition to hybrid working.

 

With SLAs often being deeply ingrained within the business and employees’ mindsets, and with some organisations shying away from abandoning SLAs due to their advantage of being ‘native’ to the technology, it’s vital that businesses use the right tools and partners to help consciously implement new measurements and navigate the company culture shift.

 

By uncovering the value in this experience and employee-led workplace data, business leaders can drive stronger outcomes quicker than ever before by improving employee buy-in, boosting productivity, and increasing overall job satisfaction. And by employing the right solutions to reveal and utilise this digital workplace data, the path to hybrid work success is secured and simplified.

 

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Eimear Gunn is UKI Digital Workplace Service Practice Leader at Kyndryl

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com