Organisations in NZ Need to Invest in New Culture of Work

Organisations in New Zealand Need to Invest in New Culture of Work to Succeed in Digital Transformation

Microsoft Study finds that 72% of New Zealand’s workers expect their organisations to invest in culture development and 76% expect leaders to close the digital skills gap

New Zealand, 19 October 2017 - The changing face of the Kiwi workforce has resulted in a need for organisations to foster a new culture of work to achieve digital transformation success, a Microsoft Study[1]has concluded. In fact, 72% felt that more could be done by their organisations to invest in culture development.

The Study found the following factors influencing the culture of work in New Zealand today:

1. Increasingly mobile workforce and exposure to new security risks: The rise of mobility and proliferation of mobile and cloud technologies have resulted in individuals working across multiple locations and devices. The Study found that only 31% of respondents are spending all of their work hours in the office, and slightly more than half (53%) are working off personal smartphones.
2. The rise of diverse teams: The Study found that 67% of New Zealand workers are already working in multiple teams at any one point in time. This makes the availability of real-time insights and collaboration tools crucial to get work done.
3. Gaps in employees’ digital skills even as leaders are in the motion of embracing digital transformation: As the bar is raised with new technologies adopted across industries, deployment is uneven. In fact, 76% of respondents felt that more could be done to bridge the digital skills gap among workers.
Microsoft New Zealand’s Cloud Productivity Business Leader, Mark Walton said, “The rise of digital technologies, along with a new generation of millennials entering the workforce, has brought about a need to address changing workers’ expectations, knowledge and skills, as well as the tools they use. In addition, due to deployment of advanced and emerging technologies, organisations need to relook at reskilling its workforce to develop creative and strategic skills for the future.”

Even as three quarters of business leaders in New Zealand acknowledge the need to transform into a digital business in order to succeed, people are ultimately the main drivers of digital transformation. “People are at the heart of digital transformation. The challenge organisations face now is how to implement new ways to foster a modern culture of work to better empower workers.” said Walton.

To unlock the potential of employees, organisations need to address and elevate their workforce through addressing the core values of the new culture of work:

1. Unlocking employees’ creativity
Collaboration fuels innovation through sharing of ideas and enables flexibility in how people work through a connected experience, while working seamlessly across devices. The Study found that most respondents feel restricted in the way they work today, with 54% highlighting that they needed to be physically present in office as equipment or tools used for their line of work is only available in the workplace.

2. Fuelling teamwork
By equipping all workers with a universal toolkit for collaboration, organisations offer its people choice and ownership as to how they work together and collaborate in real-time. In fact, the Study found that around 29% polled highlighted that access to technology for collaboration such that they can respond in a timely manner to internal and external requests was important in their line of work.

3. Strengthening Security
Today, 65% of respondents are working on employer-issued PCs, but 53% are also working on personal smartphones, which underscores potential security risks. In fact, 56% of respondents admitted to checking personal emails on company-issued devices, and are doing so for convenience sake. Therefore, leaders need to strengthen their security not to put organisations’ confidential data at risk to address the need for workers to work without barriers and without impeding productivity.

4. Bringing Simplicity
With the rise of apps, devices, services and security risks in the workplace, there is a need to streamline the IT management, break down service siloes so that disparate data can be combined and reasoned in new ways and reduce complexity. In fact, a Microsoft Asia Pacific IT leaders study[2]found that 53% of IT decision makers in New Zealand agreed that there is a need to reduce complexity of managing their existing IT security portfolio.

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