About half (49%) of employees are frustrated by the tech and tools their organisation provides and 64% believe that the way they interact with technology directly impacts morale, according to Ivanti’s State of the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) study.
For this study, Ivanti canvassed the opinions of 8,000 office workers, 1,600 IT business professionals and 800 C-level managers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, China and Australia.
The report revealed that 26% of employees are considering quitting their jobs because they lack suitable tech.
Also, 42% of workers surveyed have spent their own money on better tech to work more productively, and 65% believe they would be more productive if they had better technology at their disposal.
Meanwhile, conflicting views remain between C-Suite, IT and employees when it comes to the future of work and technology’s role in enabling the culture of hybrid work.
Just 13% of knowledge workers prefer to work exclusively from the office, yet 56% of CXOs still feel that employees need to be in the office to be productive.
Also, 74% of the C-Suite report they are more productive since the start of the pandemic – showing a disconnect between what they have experienced and what they believe employees need to do to be productive.
Globally, the C-Suite’s number one priority was employee productivity, with workplace culture and employee satisfaction falling further down the list. Further, 62% of the C-Suite concedes that leadership prioritises profitability over employee experience.
As employee experience continues to fall to the bottom of the C-Suite agenda, IT will continue to deprioritise it on theirs, with only 21% of IT leaders considering the end user experience to be the main priority when selecting new tools.
The top challenges reported by office workers include too many emails or chat messages (28%), a lack of connection to coworkers (27%) and software not working properly (23%).
Despite these challenges and executive scepticism, all groups reported being more productive in the era of hybrid work, highlighting the fact that it is not so much the place of work that impacts productivity, but the experience that people have when interacting with technology.
“The Everywhere Workplace has forever changed employee expectations when it comes to where they work, how they work and what device they work on,” said Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott. “The Digital Employee Experience should be a board level priority and IT teams are poised to be strategic leaders in their organisation to make it happen.”
The growing variety of devices and networks that hybrid workers use has greatly expanded the inventory of assets that IT teams need to manage, but 32% of IT professionals still use spreadsheets to track these assets and only 47% agree completely that their organisations have full visibility into every device that attempts to access their network.
The challenge becomes more complex when there is pressure from the top to bypass security measures, with 49% of C-level executives reporting they have requested to bypass one or more security measures in the last year.
