Across the globe, organizations and individuals have been grappling with this new world of work—where the office is no longer the beating heart of a company, and entire teams are working remotely. Business leaders must act in the short and long term to support employees as they transition to alternative ways of working.
We’ve partnered with Qualtrics on an updated global workplace productivity survey (similar to last year’s Nitro Productivity Report) to identify trends in knowledge workers’ document behaviors and how they’ve changed as a result of the global crisis, including the impact on productivity levels and job satisfaction. This report covers six trends that merit close attention to keep business goals moving forward in this “new normal”. In our latest webinar, we explore these insights and compare how things have changed since our 2019 research. During the webinar discussion, Nitro CEO & Founder, Sam Chandler and GigaOm Research Analyst, Stowe Boyd evaluate the reasons why we now have a more productive, flexible, and cost-effective way of working ahead of us and highlight how the remote work model is a structural change, not a temporal one.
If you didn’t catch the live webinar, you can choose to soak up these meaningful insights in a few ways—simply continue reading or access the discussion in full by listening to the webinar on-demand here. We hope you enjoy it!
Insight 1
Working from home brings higher job satisfaction
The shift to remote work happened at an unprecedented speed. Some teams moved to distributed work almost overnight. 64% of workers are now satisfied with their jobs and only 39% have thought about changing jobs in the last six months (compared to 45% last year). Remote work is creating huge opportunities for both organizations and people. Working from anywhere means that people can now live where they want to and still have their dream job. It’s changing how business gets done and means that we can reach new levels of happiness and productivity.
Insight 2
95% of knowledge workers see room to improve how their organizations handle documents
Document workflows remain a pain point. Only 61% of knowledge workers say their workflows are very efficient (vs. 71% in 2019). This decline is a reflection that even though we know there is an urgent demand for better document productivity and digital workflow tools they are not deployed at scale yet. This highlights a huge opportunity for businesses to focus on improving so that their teams, their people, and by extension their organizations can be more productive.
Insight 3
As everything changes, the ability to adapt becomes the competitive advantage
Digital transformation is necessary and now more urgent. Knowledge workers believe that remote work requires new solutions and have revealed ways to improve their organizations. Here are the top three:
- Better training on tools and technologies (38%)
- More automated processes and workflows (38%)
- Enhanced focus on documenting and standardizing processes (35%)
A staggering third of knowledge workers believe that management is unaware of the challenges to improvement. Without knowledge of the barriers to improvement how can leaders keep business goals moving forward especially during these challenging times?
Where is the future of work headed?
Digital workflows are now the expectation rather than an exception. 67% of knowledge workers say that working from home is very or extremely important when considering future job opportunities. By relying on people working from home, companies can reduce their office footprint, they no longer need gigantic corporate HQ’s, and can save on high real estate costs.
This is a bargain where both sides of the transaction win—it’s better for employers and its better for employees, that’s the reality of normalized remote work. We have an exciting more productive and lower cost future ahead of us. With these insights and recommendations in hand, you’ll be able to make meaningful changes in your organization. Stay tuned we have more webinars coming soon!
These six global trends in document productivity during the pandemic are the perfect companion piece for this webinar, access them now to better prepare for the inevitable future of remote work.
