Businesses concerned about the well-being of their employees amid COVID-19 can be reassured, according to recent on-the-pulse research by global consultancy OrgVitality. Other research suggests an anywhere, anytime model facilitated by digital data and platforms will be key to driving employee and customer confidence.

Protect Your People Power – Employee Satisfaction and Collaboration

“The good will of employees is not an asset to be squandered,” OrgVitality CEO Jeffrey Saltzman has commented.

“How companies handle the return to onsite work, the continuation of remote work, and any other uncertainties will determine how well they maintain employee confidence.”

OrgVitality’s Employee Well-Being & Business Resilience survey involved 59,753  employees from industries including banking, hospitality, financial services, business services, and government.

Participating organisations qualified based on a desire to ensure employees had what they needed, could understand challenges, and resonated with critical messages from leadership.

Employee well-being and resilience findings included:

• 92 percent thought their organisation responded well to the crisis;
• 81 percent thought they could effectively manage their work/personal demands;
• 93 percent said their team was adapting to how they worked in response to the crisis;
• 86 percent said they had the tools and resources they needed.

The study also found significant gaps when customer-facing employees were analysed as distinct from non-customer facing employees.

Customer-facing employees scored effective collaboration at 79 percent, with co-workers who didn’t have direct contact with customers weighing in at 90 percent.

This gauge on employees during COVID-19 also reflects their preference of working from home, a trend many have reported wanting to continue with once the pandemic is over.

Global Workplace Analytics’ Global Work-from-Home Experience Survey, of nearly 3,000 employees, shows employees believe they successfully work from home (68%), with 77% reporting being satisfied with the flexibility involved and 69% reporting positives for their well-being.

Could Your CX be the Answer to Staying Ahead? 

The global consumer was already changing fast with rapidly-evolving tech capabilities. Now, that process is accelerated. Customers of the future expect products and services to be instantly, always available online.

Companies that invest in customer experience (CX) with digital transformation are performing most strongly. Global Pega research shows businesses that excel at CX are investing in methods to centralise analytics and decision making, This integrated approach helps businesses scale exponentially, across all its connected channels.

Successful organisations are centralising analytics and decision making approaches and scale them exponentially, across all connected channels.

Customer data platforms (53%) and real-time decision engines (45%) are the key investment areas of customer experience leaders.

Data Availability – More Essential than Ever

With customers more than ever expecting business to be ‘always on’, software and data must equally always be available.

Technology uptake could also be the major silver lining to the global pandemic as it sparks new business realisations and possibilities.

But global research from data management provider Veeam also suggests the companies hindered by unplanned downtime or insufficient software availability will suffer the most. When employees lack confidence in the business, resources are diverted away from long-term or mission-critical projects.

Both customers and employees are more clearly putting their faith in digital data and applications, with these global insights some of the latest indications that an up-to-date tech approach will be essential to driving value in modern business.