A Quiet Impact of Digital Transformation: Employee Engagement

Being a working dad has had its challenges lately. Diaper changes between Zoom calls, trying to give mom a break so she can recharge, and trying to stay focused on my own day to day is as trying as ever. I am lucky that I have good teammates and tools at my disposal to help me work with agility and flexibility. I know, however, that I am in the minority. Whether as a working parent or in these tougher economic times, employee engagement and well-being are emerging as critical issue in the workplace.

The employee frustration with the piling on work, but not appropriate compensation, is only part of the story. In Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce 2022 Report, they state that only 21% of employees are engaged while at work. That’s approximately 4 out of 5 team members are disengaged while at work, with the vast majority are “bored, apathetic, frustrated, and distracted at work.” Furthermore, this same report states that 44% of employees experienced a lot of stress at work. Stressed and disengaged is a costly combination for any organization given that a Gallup also found that “business units with engaged workers have a 23% higher profit compared to workers with business units with miserable workers.”

One of the numbers that always stands out to me is that the average employee spends 25% of their work week simply looking for documents or data they need to do their job. That’s 25% of their time simply getting what they need to be productive.?What are the chances these same employees are the 4 out of 5 that are disengaged at work or stressed out because they cannot get what they need, when they need it, where they need it?

I don’t have a magical answer for how to address these challenges. That’s for folks with far better credentials and job titles than me to sort out. Where I do see this in my day to day is in my experience helping organizations evaluate software tools to optimize and automate processes. Part of this process is a discovery of the current processes a team utilizes to do their jobs today that are not working for where they need to be tomorrow. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar:

• Managing complex approval processes via email or spreadsheets
• Spending hours printing documents or emails to access the data on those forms
• Using poorly managed network drives or shared drives to exchange information (often with little to now controls)
• Utilizing handwritten forms for things such as PTO, Purchase Requisitions, or Work Orders
• Manually saving and moving files because out of date systems don’t work well together
• Copying and pasting information from one file to another (and many other data entry tasks)

Having a two month baby at home makes me appreciate actual quiet. You know, where the absence of sound is actually enjoyable and a moment to gather yourself for whatever is going to happen when that same baby wakes up.?But “Quiet” is now everywhere you look, from Quiet Quitting to Quiet Hiring to now “Quiet Promoting”.

Whatever the circumstances may be around the new use and definition of Quiet in our business world, the latest iteration of the moving in silence trend is the aforementioned Quiet Promoting.?According to a recent Fast Company article, Quiet Promoting is where team members are given added work and responsibilities, but not the title, perks, and compensation that come along with it.

This really isn’t anything new, but jumped out in a survey referenced by Fast Company. Performed by JobSage, 78% of American workers have experienced a ‘quiet promotion,’ with 57% saying they’ve felt manipulated or taken advantage of by an employer asking them to do more work. This is the outcome of the “do more with less” approach organizations feel they must take, but I’ve made my thoughts on that mentality very well known as counterproductive.

If your teams cannot get engaged with their work, either because processes are broken or information is too hard to find, how can you expect them to do “more with less”? How can we be surprised when institutional memory walks out the door and business suffers as a result? These issues, while individually important, are all connected.

I think it’s safe to say that employee disengagement and the frustrations those same employees feel about their workloads and ability to actually get their work done is very closely linked. There is no single answer. If there was, the data in these studies would look very different. But, organizations that have embraced tools such as Content Services and Intelligent Automation have certainly been better equipped to handle these challenges. By equipping people with right platforms to manage their processes, it’s far more likely you’ll get more than 1 in 5 engaged in their work .

Joe Russo is an Intelligent Information Management Account Executive with Konica Minolta, a Hyland Software Platinum Elite Partner and a 2020 Kofax Partner of the Year. Joe has previously contributed to the The OnBase Blog and The Hyland Blog. His work has also appeared on Mic.com, The Fraternity Advisor, and Factory of Sadness, a Cleveland sports website operated by Fansided