Closing the Gap: An Engaged Workforce With Inadequate Tech

What ingredients are stirred into a company to create fizzing performances and potent indicators? The quality of leadership, clarity and continuity of communication, engaged workers, top-of-the-line technology. All of these are, of course, strong aspects of the recipe.

All the highest-functioning companies, particularly the top development and tech consultancies, find the right equilibrium among them to maintain such a balance — ensuring the upgrades and expansions in technologies along with a workforce that is trained and specialized in them in an ongoing, evolving process.

Yet finding good, objective metrics for these are hard to come by. Particularly how they relate to each other. In order to look at the state of the nuances between them, Beagle Research Group, an analyst firm that carries out customer science for research, took to uncovering employees’ engagement and their relationship with technology.

State of the workforce

The findings were intriguing. Beagle found that the levels of engagement and professionalism among the workforce were high, with workers focussed on their tasks. Put simply, most employees enjoy their jobs.

Yet a worrying discovery was the gap between this and the technology systems which they were using. Almost half of the respondents thought that the tech in which they worked with was good for their everyday work — a number which is a strong signal to managers and investors that there is a wide disparity between the quality of the workforce and limitations of the technology. At first glance, 50% is a decent number for any affirmative response. But the questions of what is being affirmed matters. 

For example, the percentage of registered Americans voting in presidential elections has not reached above 60% since the ‘60s is considered low in terms of democratic participation. But 40% of Americans that believe in creationism is a figure that is considered high, particularly when compared to the amount of creationists in Western Europe.

Another worrying statistic that Beagle found was that 29% of those interviewed had no opinion of the technology that they work with. Whether that’s because of infectious apathy among the office or perhaps, simply, a lack of knowledge, which maintains low levels of interest in the tech that they interface with on a daily basis.

The takeaway of the whole study is that in order to excel at what you do and carry your team along with you, knowing and understanding the tech that is used by those who actually interact with it is one of the most common barriers to breach.

This is particularly true when your business is all about tech. As a Demandware (now SFCC) agency, of course our dev and strategy teams are fully focussed on technology, but so are our graphic designers, our marketers, our human resource staff. Because we know that in order to head in the same direction, we all must be invested in the tech that we all use on a daily basis.    

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Demandware (now Salesforce Commerce Cloud) agencies. Contact us to see how we can work together.