Your Employees are Shopping Online at Work. Why You Shouldn’t Care

Tim Minahan
3 min readNov 26, 2018

--

The holiday shopping season is in full swing. And your employees are doing a lot of it at work. If you’re like most managers, your immediate concern is around productivity loss. But that’s actually the least of your worries. The real issue is engagement — or lack thereof. According to research from Gallup, 87 percent of employees worldwide are not engaged. And many may be looking for jobs. That’s the real problem.

We all know that it’s people that make a business go. But they are harder than ever to find — and keep. Around the world, there are officially more jobs than people to fill them. And things don’t look to improve anytime soon. By 2020, McKinsey & Company estimates there will be a shortage of 95 million medium-to-high-skilled workers globally.

The good news here is that the problem can be fixed. Want to win the battle for talent? Create a positive experience for that engages employees and allows them to thrive.

Be flexible

Today’s employees aren’t on the traditional clock. And they’re no longer chained to the office or their desktop computers. They’re mobile. And they expect to be able to work when and where they want on any number of devices, including laptops, phones and tablets. Take advantage of technology and create a flexible digital workspace through which your employees can connect to work anywhere, anytime using the devices of their choice in a secure and reliable manner. And give them a few hours to shop and manage their personal lives. They’ll be more engaged and productive as a result.

Find talent where it lives

There is talent out there. It just may not be where you need it to be. With digital workspaces, this doesn’t matter because you can go where the talent is. You can tap into the “Home Force” and bring back mothers who put their careers on hold or people who left to care for aging parents. You can set up Baby Boomers who retired and took specialized skills and knowledge with them to work five to 10 hours a week from home. And you can get the right people in the right places to unlock innovation, engage customers, and move your business forward.

Stand back and let work happen

Today’s workplace has to be flexible and give employees the freedom to choose when, where and how they work. But it also has to be secure. With the right digital workspace solution, you can give employees access to the ever-increasing list of SaaS, web and mobile apps they prefer to use in one unified experience and IT a single control plane through which they can onboard and manage application performance without getting in the way. And you can deliver it all in a contextual wrapper that dynamically applies security policies based on a user’s behavior and environment, allowing them to work the way they want with the confidence that their applications, information and devices are safe.

Employee experience isn’t just a buzz term, but a competitive advantage that will ultimately separate winners from the losers. As Gallup notes in The Engaged Workplace, “Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share.” The best companies recognize this and are fast moving to deliver a superior employee experience through which they can find — and most important, keep the talent they need to drive innovation, productivity, customer satisfaction and revenue. Don’t be a laggard. Because laggards will be losers.

--

--

Tim Minahan
Tim Minahan

Written by Tim Minahan

Tim Minahan is the executive vice president, business strategy and chief marketing officer at Citrix, a leading provider of digital workspace solutions.

No responses yet