FEATURE : HYBRID WORK FUTURES
Internet . After all , you may not own the Internet , but you do own the digital experience of your customers and employees .
Employee experience
The Internet has dramatically reshaped employee experience , and particularly the expectations that employees have for the places they work .
This has flow-on effects for how talent is attracted and retained , and for productivity .
THOSE WITHOUT SOUND DIGITAL SYSTEMS WILL
STRUGGLE TO MEET THAT NEED AND FACE AN
IMMINENT TALENT EXODUS AS A RESULT .
At a macro level , we see this manifesting in the Great Resignation , a mass exodus of staff chasing more flexible working conditions . It ’ s a challenge , but also a “ great opportunity for organizations to transform in deep ways because there ’ s no going back to the rigid models and workplace hierarchies of the past .”
Change comes at an individual organizational level . Organizations can lean on an existing body of research and on maturity models to navigate the hybrid work space . Change will involve giving employees the technical capability and the flexibility to decide where they work from . It may involve offering to automate employees ’ most basic or repeatable functions , to enable more time for higherorder tasks and innovative thinking .
Ultimately , it will involve listening to employees , finding out what they want , and giving it to them as best as possible . With digital skills in high demand , it is an employees ’ market and retention is crucial . Giving existing employees the best digital experience possible will go a long way to keeping them .
Stakeholder experience
Customer and stakeholder – such as vendor and partner – experience continues to be massively reshaped by digitization and the Internet .
Organizations faced with the challenges of maintaining performance and productivity in an Internet-driven workplace may want to consider restructuring their partner and service provider relationships .
It ’ s not feasible or practical to manage all the parties involved in end-to-end service delivery . It can be a while before an outage being experienced by users is acknowledged or reflected in a provider ’ s service status ; delays in recognizing a fault delays rectifying it as well .
Organizations should establish independent visibility into their end-to-end Internet-powered network to see issues form and escalate them , without having to rely on status updates from official channels .
More than that , they should pursue new models of service delivery – particularly service-level relationships – where providers take responsibility for the end-to-end experience , not just the uptime of a single service .
Meanwhile , customer needs are very similar to employees . They are setting a high – and rising – bar for what constitutes a good or competitive user experience . Their ‘ Great Resignation ’, if they ’ re unhappy , will be to stop doing business with you . That should be reason enough to understand their needs and the experience they get from your competition , and to adjust your online-powered services accordingly .
For all Internet-powered experiences – internal , employee , customer and other stakeholders – endto-end Internet visibility and independent digital experience monitoring is crucial . This is one of the most significant lessons of last year , and the one that will position organizations best for the future . p
Mike Hicks , Principal Solutions Analyst at Cisco ThousandEyes
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