If you are a hiring manager concerned with attracting top talent, what would you advertise about your available positions? Would you focus on the organization’s opportunity for advancement, the positions’ higher-than-average salaries, or your enviable benefits and perks packages? Undoubtedly, any of these would attract some applicants, but the feature that most job hunters and employees crave might not be something you expect – it’s tech.
Technology has evolved at breakneck speeds over the last couple decades. Today, consumers have access to a menagerie of smart gadgets that customize their behaviors and automatically complete tasks. Yet, in the workplace, many employees are stuck using archaic machines that don’t perform to their needs or expectations.
Though employers might view themselves as technologically advanced, employees know the truth: Too many organizations are stuck in the digital dark ages, and more than anything else, workers want their tech to come into the light. Here’s how you can adopt more cutting-edge tech to engage current employees and attract new ones.
Understand Risk Factors
Before you can supply your employees with the tech they want, you must better understand a few aspects of your business that may impact how technology affects performance and profits. Not all companies are immediately prepared to accept new technology. In fact, a reason your business has not already adopted to tech trends might be that your business is intolerant to change thanks to its size, age, location, industry, or staff composition.
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These risk factors make it difficult, expensive, and unproductive to enhance tech, so many businesses with one or more of these aspects is unlikely to organically advance technologically. If you are trying to attract younger talent into your pool, you might need to fight against an established risk factor holding your business back.
Embrace Mobility
It’s likely that your employees are already using mobile devices to do their work, whether you want them to or not. An estimated half of all work-related emails are read on mobile devices, which might be connected to public networks or insufficiently protected private networks. By ignoring personal devices that use your business data – and by refusing to integrate them appropriately into your business security strategy – you are inviting insecurity into your business and increasing the likelihood of a grievous attack.
If you fail to listen to your employees’ pleas for enhanced tech, the tech your workforce employs will advance without you. You should develop an enterprise mobility management strategy to ensure that your business remains safe and productive while your employees use mobile devices to complete work.
Talk to Your Workforce
As a business leader, you can’t be certain what your workforce needs on a daily basis without communicating with them on the matter. Because your job isn’t identical to theirs – and because you likely haven’t performed their job in several years, if at all – you need their insight into what tech would improve their performance before you make any changes or advances to your tech strategy.
Likely, your lower-level staff won’t know all tech solutions available to them, but they can identify elements of their workday that are significantly slower or more difficult. If you can apply tech to poor processes to make them more efficient, you will succeed in providing the tech your employees want and need.
Enhance User Experience
Sometimes, it isn’t that the devices themselves are outdated or impractical but rather that the software you are running on them isn’t optimal for the tasks your employees perform. As you open up conversations with your workforce, you should pay close attention to their experience using different tech tools, including existing applications and programs.
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If the hardware seems fast and agile but work continues to be slow and difficult, you might need to reconfigure your software solutions before you adopt other tech. Alternatively, you might need to provide better training for your workforce, so they feel more competent interacting with your current tools.
Stay Open-Minded
Too many business leaders have kept innovation at an arm’s length for fear that the latest tools won’t provide any benefits. Indeed, Bill Gates allowed Microsoft to fall behind Google because he rejected the idea that comprehensive search engines were necessary tools. Change is scary, especially when you have worked hard to develop a stable foundation for your business.
However, without change, your business will crumble slowly, if not all at once. As much as possible, you should remain informed about developments in tech that might impact your business and be willing to change when the time comes.
