The power of empowerment

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Employers today are obsessed with doing more with the same, or indeed less. Driving efficiency, optimising efforts, sweating assets – all terms used frequently to signify an organisation looking to get the best out of their investments – whether IT hardware, office space or, increasingly, its people.

When it comes to workforces, the key word is productivity.
It’s a major theme across all sectors. At a macro level, a global productivity slowdown continues to baffle economists, with little consensus apart from the fact that low productivity undermines economic growth. If we’re to double the global economy, per PWC’s suggestions for 2050, that needs to be arrested and, indeed, reversed.

The same predictions do highlight the potential enabler of this impressive growth – ‘technology-driven productivity improvements’. One of the chief benefits of digitalisation has long been the potential for digital ways of working to improve the way we work to benefit both employers, in terms of increased productivity (and achieving the aim of doing, or producing, more with the same), and employees, in terms of getting more done without working longer hours.

How is digitalisation achieved?
The latest VMware Digital Workspace report suggests that to realise the benefits of digital technologies, employers need to empower employees. In this context, it means greater access to the applications workers prefer and need to do their job. The result – almost five times more likely to report productivity gains, with 17% less time spent on manual processes vs traditional employees.

These findings, the result of a survey of over 2,000 CIOs and end-users of businesses across 16 countries, highlights the critical point of digitalisation – that it’s not just about changing processes or hardware, but about changing culture.

Employers need to reconsider how they view employees.
They need to trust their workers’ judgement, whilst balancing the needs and requirements of security and corporate governance.

It’s no surprise that organisations that have already started trusting their employees more are ones that are more likely to be advanced in their digital transformation initiatives.

Empowered employees are more than twice as likely to rate their employers as leaders in digital transformation compared to other employees (47 percent vs. 20 percent).
It also has a direct impact on the war for talent, another major focus for businesses in the current climate – companies with empowered employees are four times more likely to have highlighted as a more desirable place to work (51 percent to 13 percent).

To read more about the impact of the digital workplace, take a look at the executive report here. If you’d like to understand how you could start your transformation into a digital workplace, read our End-User Computing blog.

To learn more about how VMware’s digital solutions can help you empower your workforce, download our dummies guide on secure digital workspace here.

Category: News & Highlights