Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Hybrid Workforces, AI-Driven IT Tools, and the Future of the Digital Employee Experience
By Marc Moesse, SVP of Product, Lakeside Software
As we head into 2022, one clear thing is that the face of America’s workforce has changed for the foreseeable future, if not forever, with some businesses moving to fully remote operations or at least adopting a hybrid model. According to a report by Forrester, 60% of companies will operate in a hybrid model, and 10% will transition to an “anywhere work” strategy – leaving many employees to work remotely. As the hybrid workforce ramps up, the inevitable challenges faced by IT professionals linger. Thankfully, there are emerging technologies available to help IT technicians adjust to assisting employees working remotely, whether 100% of the time or partially.
There are other changes businesses and IT teams are undergoing that appear to be part of our future:
DEX is a priority
The reality and mindset shared by companies are that digital employee experience (DEX) is becoming a priority. According to a Lakeside Software survey of CEOs from various industries, 72% said DEX was a medium or lower-level priority before the pandemic. In contrast, 90% of them agree that DEX is a medium to very high priority going into 2022. Additionally, a separate survey of IT professionals reported that 67% of technicians rank DEX as a critical priority.
The same group of CEOs anticipate that improving their DEX would drastically improve their costs and productivity with a 12.1% revenue increase, 18.1% cost reduction, and 14% productivity increase. If those stats aren’t enough to persuade companies to make DEX a priority in the new year, they can consider the costs:
- When DEX is low, IT costs are high – The average IT ticket costs $22.50, so three of those per week takes up $67.50
- The average cost of resolving reported IT issues for just one employee is $3,240
Remote/Hybrid work is here to stay
CEOs and CHROs predict that about 43% of employees will continue to work remotely or as part of a post-pandemic hybrid business model. With an increase in virtual work comes the inevitable IT challenges, such as reduced collaboration and teamwork, data/privacy, and internet connectivity. Thankfully, these challenges can be rectified by an end-to-end digital employee management (DEM) solution.
Without an automated system, the current mentality among employees is that the DEX affects their daily work, with 66% of employees saying the time to resolve tech issues harms their ability to get their jobs done, meet customer needs, and meet deliverable deadlines.
The future of IT is proactive
IT has traditionally operated in a reactive fashion, addressing issues only when the end user submits a ticket and reports a problem. This inevitably results in disruptive, back-and-forth troubleshooting that degrades productivity for the end user and IT.
With a proactive IT approach, the focus shifts to prevention. An IT team that prioritizes and end user experience will have the tools that provide the visibility and data to monitor any possible issues and stop them before they happen – saving time, money, and productivity.
By applying analytics and valuable insights to big data, IT technicians can automate their processes and improve service delivery, which is critical to building proactive operations and delivering better DEX.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marc Moesse has more than 20 years of experience across B2B software companies spending the last 10 years building and maturing Product organizations at enterprise SaaS startups. Before joining Lakeside, Marc held executive and leadership roles at Privitar (Digital Privacy), SecurityScorecard (Cyber Security Ratings) and Veracode (Application Security). Across these companies and roles, Marc helped grow revenue, customers, and active users by as much as 10x through a combination of new product introductions, maturing of existing products and streamlining the journey and experience of end users.
