You don’t need me to tell you that the global pandemic changed how organizations work, impacting corporate IT service delivery and support capabilities. But much of what was deployed in the first half of 2020 to aid homeworking employees was a rapidly applied “band-aid” that ensured business continuity. Now, with some employees back in the office, some working remotely, and some in a hybrid of the two, there’s a need to ensure that the IT service delivery and support capabilities employed are fit-for-purpose in enabling end-users to work wherever they might be.

If your IT organization has adopted ITIL, consider this as continual improvement. If not, then it’s simply improvement. But in both instances, it’s ensuring that your IT organization delivers the services and IT support capabilities that your business needs.

What do your remote workers need?

In 2020, I think we all knew what the employees who found themselves forced into homeworking needed. In IT, we probably knew better what they needed than the employees did themselves. But now, two years later, it’s likely no longer the case, especially with hybrid working, also known as working-from-anywhere (WFA), now the dominant way of working for half of organizations according to recent ManageEngine survey data.

So how well do you understand the needs of your remote working end-users – both homeworkers and those WFA? How do your IT organization’s services enable them to do the work they need to do productively? Plus, when that technology isn’t working as it should, how easy is it to access the support they need?

Like most IT organizations, the traditional IT metrics you employ are unlikely to provide this insight. First, these metrics likely focus on operational performance, i.e. what IT does rather than what it achieves. Second, current reporting capabilities might not be differentiating between office-based and remote workers. It’s probably just a pan-organization view of IT’s performance that doesn’t appreciate that remote workers have different needs and expectations to their office-based counterparts.

Importantly, the current IT service delivery and support capabilities might adversely impact remote workers, particularly their productivity. This issue is a significant opportunity for experience data to help.

Looking at the quality of remote worker enablement using experience data

In addition to the individual and benchmark end-user experience data we’ve collected and collated for customers for over half a decade, we also introduced insight into remote-worker experiences at the outset of the pandemic. This new dataset enabled IT organizations to understand where the IT status quo, and any changes they were making, was helping or hindering end-users.

This service has continued based on the additional value delivered to our customers. The latest aggregated data for the last six months provides essential insights into remote-worker enablement – from their issues to how well improvements are working.

The level of remote-worker-enablement success as we entered 2022

The remote-working headline from the latest Global IT Experience Benchmark Report is that organizations continue to get better at supporting employees in remote work. Employee happiness with remote work increased from 57 to 69 over the past year (as shown below).

It’s excellent news, but please note that this isn’t for an average organization. It’s for an average customer organization that has been, by being a customer, focused on improving the end-user experience and reducing lost productivity.

Importantly, though, it should make you question whether your IT organization is doing enough for remote employees, especially if it can’t see and understand how this now-large group of employees is being helped or hindered by IT.

But knowing how IT is impacting remote employees is not enough

As the saying goes, “the devil is in the detail.” Or, as we call them, the factors that influence end-user experiences – the good, the bad, and the neutral.

Interestingly, our H2/2021 data shows that end-users made more evenly distributed selections between the remote-work feedback factor options than they did for the experience with ticket-based IT. In other words, there are no specific factors that stand out as dominant influencers of end-user happiness or unhappiness with remote work.

This insight, in itself, is important because it means that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that IT organizations can take to optimize remote work. Perhaps even without collecting experience data themselves. Instead, the only way an IT organization can understand what matters most to its remote workers is to gather experience data internally.

The following three charts show this relatively even distribution of remote work happiness factors.

Importantly, though, your organization’s own feedback data will start to highlight what’s working and what’s not. Plus, and this is critical, it will provide insight into what matters most such that (continual) improvement initiatives can be focused on the right things, i.e. what matters most to remote workers.

If you want to find out more about how to enable your organization’s remote workers better, and to be one of the first to see the complete set of data points and insights from the H2 2021 Global IT Experience Benchmark Report, then please register to our webinar on Thursday 24^th February (or watch later, on demand).

Sami Kallio is the CEO and co-founder of HappySignals. Before starting HappySignals, he worked as the CEO of Palmu.exe, a service design company. Before that, he was responsible for the service design unit at Tieto Corporation. He believes happiness and productivity are the keys to transforming business IT culture for the better.