According to new research, good IT facilities to work with are increasingly important for many employees. It can even make or break a working relationship.
This is one of the conclusions of the 2021 State of Work report by Adobe subsidiary Workfront. Workfront looked at the importance of IT facilities for the modern knowledge worker and to what extent this has changed in the past year, now that the world is under the spell of the corona pandemic and people are working at home in droves.
Good IT important for productivity
The report shows that 37 percent of millennials consider positive information about a potential employer’s IT situation when choosing an employer. In the generation before that, this percentage is still lower at 26 percent, but it has grown since last year. Workfront does not find this surprising, given that 80 percent of those surveyed say they depend on IT to be able to work optimally.
Optimal performance seems to be very important to the vast majority of respondents, 80 percent of them, as important as financial earnings. Similarly, 80 percent of respondents consider teamwork essential in a job. 60 per cent say they depend on IT for collaboration.
“The corona year made it clear that good connectivity technology is a prerequisite for being able to connect at all with work and each other. But the subtle mutual communication and fast group dynamics, where you briefly touch base with each other, make a comment, or adjust or motivate, are always missing at a distance. Information technology now has to keep the big picture in mind on the one hand, but must also take over the fast, small-scale switching, and that is not easy to achieve with work organised on an ad hoc basis, spread across numerous platforms,” says Swen Arnold, regional director for the Benelux at Workfront.
Bad IT a reason for quitting
When employees experience IT systems as restrictive, this is a reason for over a third of the knowledge workers surveyed to look for another job. This percentage is strikingly higher among British and American respondents, at 50 percent, than respondents who live in continental Europe. Especially with the corona pandemic, Germans seem to be more cautious about looking for a new job. Only 27 percent of them would look for a new job if the IT systems leave something to be desired.
“We are always surprised by the enormous commitment of the thousands of knowledge workers surveyed, on which the seventh Workfront 2021 State of Work report is also based,” says Workfronts Swen Arnold. The corona year made technology a prerequisite for being connected at all. But our screen has now become our entire working environment and the applications we work with are the starting point for all our actions. Understandably, we have become more critical of this. The future is therefore all the more for advanced cloud-based work management platforms, is our conviction.”
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