Paige Erickson, Managing Director, EMEA, Workfront, an Adobe company
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e’re now one year on from the ‘great home-working shift’ and in that time, much has been made about the accelerated digital transformation businesses have had to embrace, and how this might negatively impact a dispersed workforce. But has anyone stopped to gauge how those impacted individuals feel about this ever-growing proliferation of—and reliance on —technology? Well, they should, because in the UK at least, what you’re likely to find is that this digital revolution isn’t just being forced on companies by external factors, trends or pandemics. It’s a revolution being driven from the ground up, by the workers who are navigating digital solutions everyday to do their best work while away from the office.
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Ricoh UK and IBM found at the start of this year that managers were more likely to struggle with the technology demands of a work-from-home set-up, than employees who were largely “undaunted” by the transition. And Workfront’s 2021 State of Work report absolutely supports that conclusion. Back in February 2020 we launched our ‘State of Work’ survey in partnership with the Center for Generational Kinetics (CGK) as a way to better understand how Millennials and Generation Xers approach work differently. This data, generated days before we all entered into a mass remote working experiment, is a snapshot of the UK workforce pre-pandemic, before so much changed, almost overnight. We decided to run the same survey again in late 2020 to see just how much had changed in less than a year, but we couldn’t have predicted the
scale of the evolution of digital work that our survey brought to light. Jason Dorsey, President and Co -Founder, CGK noted: “With just eight months between the two studies featured in this report, a change of even three-to-five percentage points is statistically significant and worth noting. The fact that in some of the uncovered answers we see changes of five points, 10 points, or even more, is remarkable.”
UK workers are declaring good enough is no longer enough Primarily, these leaps in attitude paint a different picture to one of fear or resistance to remote working or digital tools; or of business leaders forcing their employees into an unwanted transformation. Instead, we found the number of UK digital workers who say
