The Employee Experience is Broken - Here's How to Fix It

When it comes to growing a successful company, research shows it isn't about getting the most out of employees, but delivering an experience that empowers them to be and do their best. And according to Priming a New Era of Digital Wellness, a new study conducted by Quartz Insights in partnership with Citrix Systems, technology is the secret to doing so.

"A superior employee experience is essential in fueling critical business goals, from successfully attracting and retaining talent to boosting customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and ultimately, revenue," says Donna Kimmel, EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix. "In creating flexible work environments and providing access to the tools people need and prefer to use to get things done, companies can deliver it and improve engagement, productivity and results."


Do Well by Delivering Good

And the numbers prove it. In a global survey of more than 1,000 workers conducted across industries in the US, UK, Germany, Brazil, China, Japan and Australia, Quartz researchers found that 90 % of respondents with access to "good technology" reported being more productive.

What defines "good technology?" In a word: simplicity. Of those who participated in the survey, nearly 84% said they just want applications that are intuitive and easy to use.

Don't Frustrate, Automate

Three out of four indicated that technology should eliminate friction and automate the menial tasks that dominate their days so they can focus on the meaningful work they were hired and want to do.

"People don't want to spend their time submitting purchase orders, filing expenses or searching for information," Kimmel adds. "They want to be creative and innovative and use their special skills to deliver value."

Set them Free

Modern employees also want — and expect — control over when, where and how they work and see digital technology, along with new, more flexible work arrangements, as a way to get it.

When asked to rank factors in terms of their ability to create a workplace environment that allows them to do their best work in order of importance, survey respondents put flexible work arrangements third, just behind salary and leadership and ahead of access to effective technology.

"It's clear that to attract and retain talent in today's tight labor market and move their business forward, companies need to rethink what "workplace" means and create digital environments that accommodate new work models and provide access to the tools and information employees need to do their best work when and how they want," Kimmel notes.

Strike a Balance

Technology has completely transformed the way work gets done. Today's employees can connect to the office anywhere, anytime. But it doesn't mean they should. According to the Quartz research, 67 % of survey respondents believe being "always on" has a significant negative impact on their health and well-being. But there is a cure.

Leveraging digital workspace solutions, companies can optimize the work day for every employee by organizing, guiding and automating work in an intelligent and personal way. Over 75 % of those polled by Quartz believe doing so could help them strike a better balance between their work and personal lives and prevent them from burning out. And 80 % say leadership should make this a priority.

Measure Value, not Output

"When it comes to technology, it's no longer a matter of the output it delivers, but the value it creates for employees," Kimmel says. "The best companies recognize this and are focused on designing people-centric experiences that inspire and empower their employees to deliver transformative results."

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The Employee Experience is Broken - Here's How to Fix It

When it comes to growing a successful company, research shows it isn't about getting the most out of employees, but delivering an experience that empowers them to be and do their best. And according to Priming a New Era of Digital Wellness, a new study conducted by Quartz Insights in partnership with Citrix Systems, technology is the secret to doing so.

"A superior employee experience is essential in fueling critical business goals, from successfully attracting and retaining talent to boosting customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and ultimately, revenue," says Donna Kimmel, EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix. "In creating flexible work environments and providing access to the tools people need and prefer to use to get things done, companies can deliver it and improve engagement, productivity and results."


Do Well by Delivering Good

And the numbers prove it. In a global survey of more than 1,000 workers conducted across industries in the US, UK, Germany, Brazil, China, Japan and Australia, Quartz researchers found that 90 % of respondents with access to "good technology" reported being more productive.

What defines "good technology?" In a word: simplicity. Of those who participated in the survey, nearly 84% said they just want applications that are intuitive and easy to use.

Don't Frustrate, Automate

Three out of four indicated that technology should eliminate friction and automate the menial tasks that dominate their days so they can focus on the meaningful work they were hired and want to do.

"People don't want to spend their time submitting purchase orders, filing expenses or searching for information," Kimmel adds. "They want to be creative and innovative and use their special skills to deliver value."

Set them Free

Modern employees also want — and expect — control over when, where and how they work and see digital technology, along with new, more flexible work arrangements, as a way to get it.

When asked to rank factors in terms of their ability to create a workplace environment that allows them to do their best work in order of importance, survey respondents put flexible work arrangements third, just behind salary and leadership and ahead of access to effective technology.

"It's clear that to attract and retain talent in today's tight labor market and move their business forward, companies need to rethink what "workplace" means and create digital environments that accommodate new work models and provide access to the tools and information employees need to do their best work when and how they want," Kimmel notes.

Strike a Balance

Technology has completely transformed the way work gets done. Today's employees can connect to the office anywhere, anytime. But it doesn't mean they should. According to the Quartz research, 67 % of survey respondents believe being "always on" has a significant negative impact on their health and well-being. But there is a cure.

Leveraging digital workspace solutions, companies can optimize the work day for every employee by organizing, guiding and automating work in an intelligent and personal way. Over 75 % of those polled by Quartz believe doing so could help them strike a better balance between their work and personal lives and prevent them from burning out. And 80 % say leadership should make this a priority.

Measure Value, not Output

"When it comes to technology, it's no longer a matter of the output it delivers, but the value it creates for employees," Kimmel says. "The best companies recognize this and are focused on designing people-centric experiences that inspire and empower their employees to deliver transformative results."

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Performance Bottleneck in Enterprise AI Has Been Exposed – Now We Must Fix It

Performance bottlenecks aren't uncommon when it comes to rolling out new technology, regardless of how capable or game-changing that technology might be. Every generation of new tech has encountered roadblocks that had to be overcome before it was truly able to shine. Virtualization forced organizations to rethink resource allocation, cloud transformation had us shift our focus toward scalability and elasticity, and microservices introduced entirely new challenges around observability and distributed systems. There's something different about AI, however ...

What Capital Markets Can Teach Enterprises About Integrated Data Infrastructure

Consider a single order represented across order-management, execution, and settlement systems. Each database, message broker, and application may be online and processing its own records correctly. Yet the workflow has failed if related events arrive on different clocks, rely on inconsistent state, or cannot be reconciled before an operational decision must be made ...

Why AI in IT Is Producing High Productivity but Heavy Workloads

AI now exists in almost every IT workflow. In a recent survey of more than 800 IT service professionals, all respondents indicated the use of AI in some form within their organization. But there's a growing paradox: if dashboards are clearing faster and alerts are resolved at unprecedented speed, why aren't IT service desks reporting lighter workloads? The research found that 71% of IT teams said their actual workload has remained flat or increased since adopting AI. This reality appears to contradict what we’ve been told about AI ...

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Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...