Autonomous Working: The Solution to Improving Workforce Responsiveness?
The Covid-19 pandemic forced organizations of all kinds to adopt remote working and find new ways of working to ensure business continuity. Employees were equipped with a range of technology such as collaborative tools, enterprise apps, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools, intelligent automation solutions, chatbots and so on.
These tools and technology did give employees some sense of autonomy and flexibility in doing their jobs. However, are they also creating digital fatigue? As the world opens up, will the pandemic-style of working translate well in the new normal of hybrid work? Given that hybrid work is the future, what can businesses do to derive value today and in the future?
Read on to find out.
Employees ‘Hacking’ Work to Overcome Work Friction and Other Challenges
In the fast-changing VUCA world, adaptive strategy settings and workforce responsiveness is a pre-requisite for success. The employees need to be responsive to the changing needs of customers and the dynamism of the business world. For this to happen, the structures, workflows and work design need to rapidly evolve with fast-changing times. Since resiliency and employee responsiveness are not built into the work design, the most critical challenge today is that employees are having to hack work to get it done. As a result, both employee experience and customer experience suffer.
Let us look at some hard numbers.
A recent Gartner study highlights that misaligned work design, rigid processes, trapped resources and overwhelmed teams cause work friction. This work friction accounts for two-thirds of the unrealized workforce responsiveness. This leads to employees having to hack their work to get it done, adding risks and causing time and resource wastage. They spend an extra 1.9 hours extra per day to complete routine tasks. The study says that in a typical 10,000 people organization this will translate into:
The second challenge is that the past couple of years have seen organizations adopt many different kinds of apps, tools and technology. However, a growing number of employees are fatigued by all the digital tools they have been equipped with. Since technology and the world of work are evolving rapidly, enterprises are often playing catch up as newer technology gets adopted. This creates a learning curve for employees. Further, the technologies adopted are often siloed and disconnected. So, even for completing simple tasks, employees have to go between apps, which leads to reduced productivity.
In the past, companies like Yahoo and HP ended their remote working experiments as they felt the downsides of remote working at scale outweighed its benefits. Yahoo did so since they believed there was a disjunct between the remote and on-site work and needed to become one cohesive Yahoo again.
Yahoo and HP revoked remote work way back in 2013 but not much has changed since. Some of the drawbacks and challenges continue to persist across time. The organization’s norms, through standards of performance, behavior and interaction, created a shared culture. In the short run, this shared culture helped generate cohesion, collaboration and success in remote working.
The main challenge emerged in the long run when two different cultures started to emerge. Given the benefits of co-location and in-person collaboration, the on-premise workers and managers got the upper hand. But the remote workers started to feel isolated and disenfranchised in the long run, especially by the unintended behavior of on-premise staff and the dominant on-premise work culture. If work is not reimaged and redesigned, organizations will not be able to reach their potential.
What Can We Do to Solve These Challenges?
Autonomous Working!
Autonomous working does not mean no rules or free reign for employees or that they do as they please. An autonomous workplace is built on the foundation of trust, respect, dependability and integrity. Autonomous working refers to the empowerment of employees to shape their work environment so that they can unleash their full potential.
Autonomous working makes employees self-starters and problem solvers who are agile and continuously upskilled. With autonomy, employees can effectively do what they were hired to do, irrespective of where they are situated – remote or on premises. Employee experience improves as the shared culture is intact in the hybrid work environment.
Where the work culture offers greater autonomy to employees, the employees become more resilient. Employees are more responsive to the fast-paced changes and challenges in the business environment. This reflects positively on customer experiences too.
How To Build Autonomous Working?
By leveraging digital enablement platform
What is a digital enablement platform?
A digital enablement platform is software designed to assist people with performing digital tasks and improve their productivity in the digital workplace.
To build a culture of autonomous working, employees need to be freed from the multitude of disjointed tools that only cause digital fatigue. Instead, they need to be equipped with an advanced, self-learning, natural language digital assistant.
By doing so, employees are augmented with instant assistance and analytics that makes them decision-making authorities. The digital assistant would integrate 60-70% of their desktop and cloud applications, automating repetitive, manual and data-intensive workflows. This will free the employee from digital fatigue, busywork and hacking routine tasks to get their work done. They can now focus on innovation, creativity and other high-value endeavors.
The digital assistant will equip employees with assistance, insights and real-time feedback for faster decision-making and effective functioning. Further, the digital work assistant will make recommendations on skills to learn, empowering employees to do their best work.
Be prepared for the future of work! Augment every employee with an intelligent digital assistant and build resilience into your work culture!