Three-quarters (77%) of digital workers want to participate in creating their hybrid working model according to research.
Gartner conducted its fifth biannual Digital Worker Experience survey in autumn 2022 among 4,861 full-time employees that use digital technology for work purposes, at organisations with 100 or more employees in the UK, US, India and China.
Caitlin Duffy, Gartner HR practice director, said: “One of the biggest challenges to hybrid work is the lack of alignment between the variability between what workers want and the predictability organisations, managers and workers need to be effective.
Hybrid working models
“As employee wants and needs have shifted, organisations must respond thoughtfully in order to maintain productivity and avoid attrition.”
Respondents felt that meetings wholly in-person or wholly online were equally productive (47% and 46% respectively), but found hybrid meetings, where some attendees participate in an in-person group setting and others join via webcam or phone, to be second least productive (17%). Only audio-only meetings were deemed less productive.
Gartner said that leaders can help drive productivity and improve employee experience during hybrid meetings by: ensuring all participants can see and hear everyone clearly; interact with in-meeting content sharing and conversation; join the meeting with only one button or link; and seamlessly move across operating systems and devices.
“In addition to improving hybrid meetings, leaders and managers should assess the meeting culture in their organisation and ensure an intentional mix of asynchronous and synchronous work,” said Duffy.
Many organisations have implemented employee productivity monitoring as a means to understand what workers are doing in a less visible hybrid work environment. When utilised due to mistrust, employee monitoring systems seek to determine if employees are active on devices and in applications, or whether employees are attending the office as mandated.
The report said that at the highest level of trust, employee monitoring efforts help managers see which employees are most productive and why, or whether business outcomes are being met. In this scenario, 96% of employees are more willing to accept monitoring if it leads to assistance that benefits them:
- One-third of digital workers would accept monitoring in exchange for support in finding information or data to do their job
- Thirty per cent of digital workers would accept monitoring in exchange for proactive outreach from support
- Twenty-eight per cent of digital workers would accept monitoring in exchange for streamlining information and notifications as well as getting advice on performance improvement.
Tori Paulman, senior director analyst at Gartner, said: “Progressive organisations are pursuing radical transparency around when data is being collected, what data is collected, how long it’s kept, who has access to it, and for what purpose it is being collected.
“This includes giving employees an opportunity to opt-in to information and data gathering.”
The survey also revealed that 40% of workers listed meeting face-to-face, whether that be with colleagues, managers or senior leaders, as their strongest motivator to returning to the office.
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“As the workplace continues to evolve, so does the employee experience,” added Duffy. “Increasingly, HR will need to partner with digital workplace leaders to ensure they are crafting the desired digital employee experience.”
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