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NZ businesses lacking right technology for hybrid working as digital transformation accelerates
Fri, 9th Jul 2021
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Almost half of New Zealand employees believe their company does not have the right technology in place to support a hybrid working environment, according to new research from Templafy.

The research found 44% of New Zealand employees say the organisation they are employed with do not have the right tech for hybrid working, The research revealed over two fifths of New Zealand workers (47%) say their company needs to simplify the technology tools and processes in place, with one in four employees (28%) feeling frustrated by having to switch between so many technology tools each day to complete their work.

Navigating different folders, databases and tools to find the right document is not only tiresome for employees but also carries a high cost for organisations. According to the research, New Zealand workers are losing an average of 1-3 hours per week tracking down information between tech tools, resulting in a loss of up to 156 hours each year.

While over half of New Zealand workers (56%) believe that their company will successfully adopt a hybrid workplace over the next six to twelve months, a third of employees (31%) believe a hybrid workplace will make it harder to manage information, with over four fifths of employees (81%) believing a hybrid workplace would be successful if their company invests in the right technology to support it.

"The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation roadmap for a lot of New Zealand businesses, forcing everyone to re-evaluate the workplace," says Mads Frederiksen, managing director APAC, Templafy.

"Organisations were forced to rapidly change the way they worked, with a lot of effort put into finding the right solution that allows them to remain productive and internally aligned during the transition to a hybrid workplace.

"The new way of working has changed forever, with emphasis on flexibility and remote working."

Frederiksen says using a solution like Templafy, enables organisations to be more flexible when it comes to hybrid working environments.

"These solutions are embedded in company-wide workflows, and serve teams exactly what they need, within applications they already work in. By being able to effortlessly govern content and track performance, this allows employees to work more efficiently."

Templafy's Business Enablement Report also found that the most common reasons why technology fails within the workplace include; new tools that don't integrate with existing tools and workflows (66%); a lack of consistent use of the technology company-wide (56%); and insufficient training (53%).

In order to combat disconnected content and workflows, New Zealand employees require technology that is more; company-wide so that colleagues from across the organisation can work better together (78%); user friendly and intuitive (69%) and integrated into daily workflows (66%).

What's more, nearly a fifth of New Zealanders (19%) agreed that it's a lot harder to learn and use a new technology tool in a remote environment, meaning businesses need to invest in additional training for tech tools to support flexible working.

To ensure businesses are tackling these workplace issues, it requires business enablement stacks (e.g. Slack and Zoom), which would empower staff to improve their efficiency with applications and tech tools used daily.

"It is vital to ensure the right technology setup is in place to support the future of work, a point which will remain the focus for some time to come," Frederiksen says.

"Organisations that adopt solutions with less software that does more to enable a unified, efficient and most importantly, pleasant working experience will be the ones who get to define the future of work," he says.

"Templafy's platform aligns workforces, enabling employees to create on-brand and connected content faster. These solutions create a seamless future of work."