Press release

The Employee Experience is Broken, But IT can Fix It

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Sponsored by Businesswire

It used to be that competitive salaries, benefits and career development
initiatives were enough to find and keep talent. Today, these things are
table stakes. To compete and win in the raging battle for talent,
companies need to up their game and give employees what they really
want: a simple and flexible way to get work done. Technology is a key
driver of the modern employee experience. And according to The
Experience of Work: The Role of Technology in Productivity and Engagement
,

research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) with
sponsorship from Citrix
Systems, Inc.
(NASDAQ:CTXS), companies that use it to support new
models for work and provide employees with tools that make it more
efficient and meaningful, can deliver a superior one, and in the
process, not only attract the people they need, but keep them engaged
and productive and improve their business results.

“People today want the freedom to work when, where and how they want.
And they expect things to be as easy as they are in their personal
lives,” said Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief
Marketing Officer, Citrix. “To attract and retain talent in today’s
tight labor market, companies need to rethink what ‘workplace’ means and
create digital environments that accommodate traditional, remote and gig
workers and deliver the tools, and information they need to do their
best work in a simple, unified way.”

Better Employee Experience = Better Business Results

Across geographies and industry sectors, many companies are recognizing
– and proving — that a better employee experience can lead directly to
improved business results.

According to Arthur Mazor, principal partner and HR transformation
global practice leader at Deloitte, “Many organizations now see the
ultimate objective of enhancing workforce experience to be the creation
of new value in the market, by improving the customer experience and
creating new opportunities for growth.”

The results of The Experience of Work confirm this. Of the more
than 1,100 senior executives across eight countries and industry sectors
who participated in the survey,

  • 36 percent cited enhancing customer experience and satisfaction as the
    top reason for improving employee experience, just behind productivity
    and employee engagement (40 percent)
  • 31 percent listed profitability, and
  • 30 percent called out talent retention.

Eliminate the Noise

Today’s workplace is filled with distractions and complexity that
frustrate employees and prevent real work from getting done. Within a
typical company, the average employee needs to navigate four or more
applications just to execute a single business process. And accessing
them requires managing multiple passwords and interfaces. All of this
takes time and focus away from people doing what they want – and are
paid to do.

Case in point: employees spend more than 25 percent of their time
searching for the information they need to do their jobs, and managers
more than half of their time executing routine tasks. It’s a problem IT
has largely created by steadily implementing technology they thought
would simplify work, that has only made it more difficult.

But participants in EIU study say that with the right solutions and
strategy, it can be fixed. “Employees are, after all, consumers,” said
Florian Wies, regional lead, country integration, Merck. “Delivering
digital tools in a way that’s intuitive and familiar for them will
improve their experience.”

Look Beyond Speeds and Feeds and Focus on Employee Needs

Among the key enablers of strong employee engagement identified by
respondents to The Experience of Work:

  • Ease of access to information required to get work done (47 percent)
  • Applications that are simple to use (39 percent)
  • A consumer-like user experience (33 percent)
  • Ability to work from anywhere (43 percent)
  • Choice of devices (32 percent)

Two Heads are Better than One

They say it takes a village to raise a child. And when it comes to
creating a world-class employee experience, the IT and HR executives
polled as part of The Experience of Work share this sentiment,
with nearly identical numbers of each (74 percent and 75 percent,
respectively) indicating they feel personally responsible for improving
it.

According to Donna Kimmel, Chief People Officer at Citrix, this promises
to change the game. “Employee experience is all about creating the right
environment that inspires people to do great work. And that isn’t just
HR’s responsibility,” she said. “Total rewards certainly play an
important role. But you also need to remove frustration and drive
productivity in a way that enables people to perform at their best.”

And this is where IT comes in. “There are plenty of productivity issues
that get in our way,” Kimmel adds. “We need technology that is helpful
to us. That frees us to drive innovation and collaborate.”

Create a Liquid Enterprise

Technology is resetting the boundaries for both where and how work gets
done, and traditional models won’t cut it for long. “The future of work
is dynamic and decentralized,” Minahan said. “Businesses that can
seamlessly shift their people and digital resources across workflows and
put the right insights and information at employees’ fingertips can
redefine what work means and engage their employees – and ultimately,
their customers – in new ways that enhance their success.”

To learn more about the role that technology can play in shaping the
employee experience, click
here
and download a complimentary copy of The Experience of Work:
The Role of Technology in Productivity and Engagement
. For more
information on how Citrix can help you power a better way to work, visit www.citrix.com

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is powering a better way to work with unified
workspace, networking, and analytics solutions that help organizations
unlock innovation, engage customers, and boost productivity, without
sacrificing security. With Citrix, users get a seamless work experience
and IT has a unified platform to secure, manage, and monitor diverse
technologies in complex cloud environments. Citrix solutions are in use
by more than 400,000 organizations including 99 percent of the Fortune
100 and 98 percent of the Fortune 500.

For Citrix Investors:

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