The Employee Experience Advantage

CHAPTER 6The Technological Environment

In 2016 I delivered a talk to a large organization where I explored how the workplace is changing. After my talk I held some candid discussions where employees could share pretty much anything they wanted with me. In almost every conversation I had employees told me how much they loved the people whom they worked with and the work they did. Still, many of them were extremely frustrated and unhappy with the company they were a part of. Several were already interviewing elsewhere. Naturally my response was “Why would you want to leave an organization where you love the people and the work?” At this particular company the answer was technology. Employees were extremely frustrated with the tools they were using to get their jobs done. Information would go missing, it would take too many steps to complete simple tasks, things would freeze up, and the interfaces were quite literally from the 1980s.

This made their jobs much harder to do, which in turn caused employees to get upset with one another and resent the organization for not doing anything to improve the situation.

Although we view technology as something that lives in a separate nonhuman bucket, technology has a palpable impact on the organization—it's what we use to communicate, collaborate, and actually get our jobs done. If the tools break down, then everything else around them, including the human relationships, also breaks down.

The technological environment includes everything from ...