Water companies are under immense pressure. The pandemic has caused industry-wide business challenges and with the current cost of living crisis, overheads are rising, but revenues are declining. Ofwat’s ODIs have not changed, putting pressure on already-tight budgets, and many companies are struggling to act quick enough to achieve the ever looming 2030 sustainability targets.
From daily operational tasks through to large-scale strategic plans, everything needs to be done smarter and more efficiently. Water companies must accelerate positive change to scale their businesses, achieve net zero targets and become more resilient.
The first step to achieving positive change is a human-centric workplace approach. Putting your employees first with a workplace experience (WX) approach can have a positive impact on your business, your sustainability goals and your employees and customers.
Here at Avanade we’ve conducted a global workplace study to investigate how far organisations are going to put their people-first and the difference their efforts are making to their business. The research reflects the perspectives of 2,100 senior business, IT and HR decisionmakers across multiple industries, from late 2021 into early 2022.
People first? Or people false?
When it comes to their people priorities, organisations talk a good game.
- 98% said their organisation has taken steps to transform their employee experience.
- 85% said their organisation is currently either committed to or testing a fully remote or a hybrid working model.
But there’s a problem: the same organisations are failing to truly commit to their people-first promise.
- 62% haven’t taken steps to streamline their employee experience and application ecosystem to help their people access what they need more easily.
- 61% are failing to simplify knowledge management and sharing through cloud-based platforms, AI or automation.
- 66% have yet to implement a virtualised workplace environment, providing access to applications and data anywhere, from any device.
- 60% haven’t enabled seamless communication and collaboration for all employees via a cloud workplace platform.
- 55% haven’t embraced a security model that enables all employees to work securely, wherever they’re based.
Big benefits for a WX approach
Those who are embracing a WX approach are growing both their business and their people! 99% of organisations have seen an increase in performance across the following business metrics:
- Productivity improvement – up 6.83%
- Employee retention – up 6.70%
- Customer satisfaction scores – up 6.92%
- Costs reduced – down 6.34%
- Revenue growth – up 6.72%
Those are some encouraging and powerful stats when you consider the cumulative impact on business performance!
Three key steps to a successful WX strategy
1: A collaborative, holistic WX approach
- Bring IT, HR and business leaders together to assess the suitability of your current workplace strategy in the context of your broader business strategy.
- Learn from the rapid transformation experienced in the last two years – identify new working practices that have succeeded and those that failed.
- Develop a business case to support your recommendations and outline key performance indicators.
2: Build your WX for specific employee groups
- Review and update your employee personas, addressing the impact of rapid work transformation on each group.
- Consider the people-first working practices that you want to maintain (or enable) for each group.
- Identify the necessary changes across platforms, workspaces, work processes and cultural drivers to enable hyper-personalised experiences at scale.
3: Embrace a data-driven approach
- A data-driven, insight-enabled approach is crucial to the management and evolution of your workplace strategy. Use analytics platforms as your barometer to continually evolve your WX so it stays relevant and attractive to employees.
- Identify the workplace, employee and broader business data you have and how it can help you understand workplace shifts.
- Develop a pilot scenario – including the metrics that will help you measure success.
- Scale this model to embrace broader workplace programs and commit to dedicated review cycles.
Want to become a WX pioneer? Find out how
Our market-leading WX team can help you understand how to shape your future of work strategy to grow your business and your people. Discover how we’ve helped Dutch water utility, PWN digitally transform its operations. Talk to our team today to arrange your Future of Work Assessment or download our WX report.
