Jacob Morgan, a keynote speaker, best-selling author and the co-founder of The Future of Work Community, a global innovation council of the world’s most forward thinking organizations exploring the new world of work, gave a webinar together with Konica Minolta to discuss the workplace of the future and how technology affects the employee experiences.
Morgan defines employee experience as “the intersection between employee expectations, needs, and wants, and the organisational design of those expectations, needs, and wants”. And according to him, technology is one of the three vectors, the so-called environments, that influence and shape all the employee experiences. Others are the cultural and the physical environments.
Regarding technology and according to Morgan’s research of over 250 organizations, there are three things that employees care and value most inside the organizations they work for:
- Technology must be available to everyone following equality principles, that is: it’s ok to start with a small groups, it’s not ok to block others from adopting it
- Technology should be consumer grade that is so awesome that you'll want to take it to your personal life
- Decisions around technology should take more into account employees needs instead of business requirements
Technology is also much present on the five trends that Morgan described in his book The Future of Work as being the ones that are shaping the future of work. Those are:
- New behaviours: shaped by social media and the web
- Technologies: shift to the cloud, collaborative technologies, big data and the internet of things
- The Millenial workforce: new attitudes, expectations and ways of working
- Mobility: work anytime, anywhere and on any device
- Globalisation: no boundaries
The presentation ended up with the advice to think of an organization much more like a laboratory, and much less like a factory that is replacing behaviors like process-driven, linear, fear culture with dynamic, embrace failure and run experiments.
Webinar contents are available here.