Can the Connected Worker Concept Solve the Great Workplace Disconnect?

Industrial workers are burning out in droves and labor is in short supply. Is digital transformation providing an answer or a cause? In the first of a special 3-part series, contributor Brent Kedzierski makes the case for a more human-centered approach to reinvigorate the employee experience.

Workforce engagement is a growing epidemic. A recent Gallup poll reported that only 15% of employees worldwide feel engaged.

Today’s middle managers have become stretched, overwhelmed, and burnt out. They are twice as likely as non-managerial employees to jump to new opportunities due to stress, according to research. Workers, meanwhile, have their own concerns: inner well-being, employment security (pay and employability), and identity.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report, disengaged employees cost the global economy a whopping $7.8 trillion in lost productivity. This number, while large, is set to grow because there is such a strong link between employee engagement and performance outcomes, such as retention, productivity, safety, and profitability.

Engagement has become such a pervasive issue that organizations are finally accepting that labor issues such as quiet quitting are a cry for help that are not likely to go away anytime soon. Instead, they represent a call to action to evaluate the employee experience and employee value proposition. Furthermore, employee wellness has become such a prominent issue that in 2019 the World Health Organization announced “Burnout” as an official medical diagnosis.

Studies are showing that work is becoming more - not less - frustrating for workers. Asana’s 2022 Anatomy of Work Index reported some dismal statistics. The study revealed that menial and repetitive tasks remain a persistent threat. Most shocking was the finding that 60% of a worker’s time today is “work about work.”

This means people are not actually doing the work, but performing work activities such as communicating about work, searching for information, non-value adding tasks, managing shifting priorities, and chasing status updates.

The study also showed that over the course of a year, workers spent 129 hours on duplicate work, 129 hours on unnecessary meetings, and 257 hours that could have been saved with improved processes.

Against this background of low employee engagement, companies continue to invest heavily in digital transformation initiatives. The 2022 EY-Parthenon report found that 72% of surveyed executives feel they must increase their digital transformation efforts (up from 62% in 2020).

Follow the money and you will see that the digital transformation market tops the list of investment headings; International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that digital transformation investment levels for 2022-2024 will reach $6.3 trillion. The global Industry 4.0 market is projected to grow from $130.90 billion in 2022 to $377.30 billion by 2029. The global Connected Worker market rounds out the group projected to reach $12.1 billion by 2027 according to a study conducted by Polaris Market Research.

Organizations are accelerating their digital transformation strategies because the mainstream market continues to reinforce that progress is the path to long-term growth, profitability, and competitiveness in an increasingly digital marketplace.

But is it?

Over the past decade trillions of dollars have been sunk on failed, scaled back or delayed digital transformation projects and, according to a McKinsey survey, only 16% of executives believe their organization’s digital transformation investments have successfully improved performance.

What most companies and their tech centric experts missed is that becoming a forward-thinking company requires a shift to becoming more human, not less.

The evolution of the Industry 4.0 movement from 2011 to 2021 has been another costly example of the pareto principle (or 80/20 rule). Most companies have focused 80% of their attention on the technology and 20% on the human side. In the coming decade it will be imperative to flip that ratio by ensuring the focus, tempo, and outcomes of human transformation are greater than or equal to digital transformation.

Technology plays require an engaged and digitally mature workforce. This means a workforce that possesses digital literacy, fluency, resilience, and readiness.

The Connected Worker concept must be recast by taking a human-centered approach for organizations to address boardroom level concerns around labor shortages by improving the onboarding process, time to productivity and the acceleration of upskilling and reskilling.

Given the number of pressing worker issues and low engagement levels, industry needs to capitalize on the Connected Worker concept as a means to reinvigorate the worker experience, address current pain points, and improve the anatomy of work in ways that make employees want to come to work every day.

So how do you achieve this? In part 2 of this series, I will be looking at a 6-part framework to improve the worker experience and drive human performance in the digitally connected enterprise.

What do you think? Have we been too focused on technology and not enough on our people? Does Connected Worker provide an answer? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Interested in learning more about this topic?

Join us at The Connected Worker Summit on March 28-30, 2023 and network with over 150 of your industry peers at the Norris Conference Center in Houston, TX., and learn how to evaluate the existing gaps in your connected worker capability and identify the data-driven solutions that will drive continuous improvement across your operations. Download the agenda here.