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SUSTAINABILITY
XLA > SLA:
Building sustainable environments for people
The IT sector faces many challenges within the field of Sustainability, ranging from global decarbonisation to electronic waste management. However, throughout all these hurdles, technology remains the ultimate enabler – continually creating solutions for a dynamically shifting world.
While it is often overlooked or relegated to a HR function, the way we approach people and the environments they work in is a key area that business leaders need to address when building a successful and sustainable employee strategy. At the end of the day, it’s people who shape our organisations, so placing equal weight on their workplace experience is necessary to ensure increased productivity, higher retention rates and better workplace satisfaction. This all mitigates the financial and logistical costs associated with re-hiring or onboarding, reducing the risk of having to make expensive decisions down the track.
The outcomes for creating positive employee experiences are clear, but how does IT become the active solution? First, we must look at the ways in which our people interact with technology. This plays a large part in defining people’s workplace experience, especially those working remotely or primarily online. There are several considerations here, the equipment (provisioning), assistance (service desk), and the appropriate tooling (applications).
By equipping people with the right technology, we can design an experience that best addresses the role of the employee, ensuring that purpose meets performance, and eliminate any bottlenecks from a technical perspective. Looking at how responsive a system is, whether a device is the best possible choice for a role, measuring boot times, audio/video capabilities, or portability requirements all feature in improving the technical experience. Equipping people with the right technology for their roles not only encourages greater productivity but reaffirms purpose within their vocation.
Focusing on people’s experience with technology has helped us shape a workplace product that not only helps customers meet their sustainability goals, but genuinely improve the interactions employees are having with technology, IT departments, and organisations as a whole.
Pauline Marchand
Computacenter Total Experience Lead
As with all systems, workplace or otherwise, sometimes we need help in resolving problems that unexpectedly surface. Looking at the experiences people have with service desks can provide organisations an opportunity to build value and trust with their workforce. The frustrations employees may have with ongoing unresolved issues, incorrect provisioning, or a lack of technical expertise from their service desk will lead to lower productivity, and ultimately reduced morale and confidence. Therefore, improving response times, ensuring first call resolutions and expanding both language and global time capabilities will ensure organisations that their employees are well provisioned and cared for in an ongoing manner. When thinking about applications, all of the soft-provisioning – or enablement – needs to be relevant, reliable and directly aligned to the roles of employees. How applications are administered and operated can directly influence the value that people add to their organisation. This, in part, is due to the fact that using the wrong applications, being in a rigid software environment, or perhaps there being a lack of information mobility, can lead to poor communication within teams. Poor communication ultimately lowers productivity and thus detracts from the value and purpose a person can contribute to their organisation. Streamlined SD-WANs, cloud-based applications, well-configured systems, and application integration not only allows people to do more within their roles but expands our connectivity and builds more productive teams even when in different geographies.
Using the experience model to shape the workplace is putting people, their roles, their potential, and contributions into the driving seat. Rather than asking ‘how should we equip people with work tools?’, we really need to ask, ‘how can we build a technology-based workplace experience that generates compound value for both an organisation and its people?’.
With labour markets oscillating at an unprecedented pace, attracting and retaining the right talent is paramount in sustaining a healthy and productive workforce. A recent study by mobility management software company Truce revealed that 21% of respondents stated that offering the latest technology/services was the best way employers can attract and retain talent.
The same study found that over half of the participants believed that the right technology enables them to be more productive, with a further third stating that it enabled them more flexibility.
A recent conversation with an employee of a Computacenter customer (in the financial services industry) affirmed a highly positive sentiment towards their organisation. This was based on their interactions with both their device and company’s service desk. When run through the specifications of their device, they felt that ‘the company clearly values what we contribute to the business by investing in such high-quality computers for us’. The same employee also had their company-issued device stolen from an airport, and with one call to their service desk they picked up a replacement device from their office within a day, ensuring optimal uptime and continuity of care. The coordination of this interaction between the service desk and the employee helped the employee feel valued for their continued contributions to the organisation whilst also minimising downtime and increasing productivity for the business.
With the ‘people’ experience extending beyond our interactions with devices and services, the relationship between employees and employer is changing. The value we bring to our employers is becoming reflected in the technology we’re interacting with, and in such a fast-paced industry, it’s important that we address both technological change and workforce health collectively.
Computacenter’s Total Experience Management looks at how we can embed and measure ‘experience’ in defining innovative workplace solutions. Where we used to look at SLAs amongst the components of a solution, we can now look end-to-end with XLAs (Experience Level Agreements) that focus on delivery, interaction, performance, and sentiment – offering accountability from start to finish and putting people at the heart of the solution.
For all sustainability challenges, the technology industry continues to offer new solutions to age-old problems. Managing people - no matter how small or large the organisation – will always be a challenge for organisations. As our workplace environments and labour markets rapidly change, maybe it’s time to bring the CTO into the conversation.