Are your employees digitally connected?

Keeping employees connected and productive in remote and hybrid work environments is a growing challenge for employers, according to a recent report by TeamViewer.

The report, which surveyed 500 business leaders across six countries, including Canada, shows that companies with strong digital infrastructure are seeing significant boosts in productivity, sustainability, and employee morale. Meanwhile, businesses that struggle with connectivity risk falling behind.

The TeamViewer report found that 88 per cent of businesses agree that better connectivity drives collaboration across teams, improving efficiency and productivity.

Citing a survey by Akkodis that interviewed 14,800 worldwide employees, TeamViewer reported that 76 per cent of those workers want to work for companies that have “the right systems and technologies.”

‘A shock was needed’ 

This shift has been brewing for years, but as Erik Bohlin, professor of business, economics, and public policy at the Ivey School of Business, points out, the pandemic and the mass exodus of workers online gave telework an unexpected push. Although the large-scale adoption of telecommunication is unprecedented, Bohlin explains, we luckily already had infrastructure in place to deal with it.

“There was a fortunate confluence of infrastructure capability and device capability,” he says. “If the pandemic had happened 20 years ago, we would have been much more lost in terms of being able to adapt…for this system to tilt in the massive way it’s done, a shock was needed.”

However advanced infrastructure may currently be for telecommuting and for digital networks to connect, there are still barriers to that connection in Canada as disparities in access to networks exist. “Canada, as we all know, has very big challenges with its population concentration to a few areas and a huge country,” Bohlin states.

^{Source: TeamViewer}

Digital divide continues to frustrate employees

One of the biggest hurdles many businesses face today is the digital divide, says Bohlin—a phenomenon that has been around since the early days of the internet and persists now with continuing technological advancement.

Bohlin, who has studied telecommunication for decades in Sweden and now Canada, explains how employees without reliable connections to their organizations can be affected negatively, creating feelings of disconnect that can result in losing interest in projects and eventually their performance.

“They will feel excluded... they become disincentivized and less cared for,” he says. This "digital divide" isn’t new, but it’s becoming more visible in the remote work era, where a bad internet connection can make or break an employee’s ability to stay engaged and perform their job successfully, TeamViewer reports.

Eleanor Lynch, COO of SaaS provider Alpine IQ (AIQ), stresses that organizations need to rethink the basis of how they’re structured to support remote work and employee connection overall.

“My feeling is that a lot of these problems are inherent around the organizational design of work,” she says. “And I think that this is because a lot of times remote work has been overlaid onto an in-office paradigm. And remote work is so different in so many ways.”

Lynch points out how poor connectivity creates serious communication barriers that can leave employees feeling cut off from the product of their work.

“You sometimes get isolated from the end result of what you're creating,” she said, emphasizing the importance of making sure remote workers aren’t left behind in key discussions or projects.

Poor connectivity impacts employee wellbeing and engagement

It’s not just productivity that suffers from poor connectivity—it can take a real toll on employee morale and wellbeing. Bohlin reflects on his experience teaching during the pandemic, where students with unreliable Wi-Fi struggled to keep up.

 “I had students that disconnected all the time, or had bad connections. It affected their capacity to learn and participate in discussions,” he says. “It was bad for them.”

For employees facing similar challenges, spotty internet or outdated technology can lead to disengagement and frustration. Over time, this lack of connection to the workplace can reduce job satisfaction and lead to missed opportunities for career growth.

It’s also important for employers to avoid oversaturation of too many programs that perform similar functions, says Lynch.

“You have to be intentional about that,” she says. “I have seen where it's like there's a shiny object that everybody wants to get, but it maybe necessarily doesn't add a lot of value. It just creates a lot of noise in terms of a platform or connectivity of new data.”

Lynch explains that fostering connection beyond just work tasks is key to helping employees feel like part of the team, potentially filling in that missing link of innovation. AIQ hosts regular virtual social events to encourage bonding and break up the monotony of remote work, hosted by a rotating roster of volunteers to prevent burnout or boredom.

“It helps everybody connect on a more social level,” she says. “It’s kind of a holistic approach to making sure that people not only have the resources they need to complete the work that they need to do, but [it’s about] how do you create comfortability and a shared culture that’s not totally isolated from each other?”

Bridging the connectivity gap: what employers can do

Both Lynch and Bohlin agree that companies need to take an active role in solving connectivity challenges. Lynch suggested that businesses should create integrated systems that work seamlessly together, so employees can focus on their work rather than fighting with technology.

This can be managed with a specific role, team or person who ensures integration, and that data isn’t siloed or blocked from inter-departmental flow, she says.

“What we've done is we've created what's called a central operations team,” Lynch says. “They think about the connection between systems, people and processes. They talk to departments and they say, ‘What do you feel you're missing?’ And sometimes what's missing is just a summary meeting so someone knows the outcome of something that happened, that maybe downstream impacts them, and they haven't been given that opportunity. Sometimes it's just communication that's missing, and sometimes it's access.”

She explains that the speed with which many organizations adopted and implemented various digital platforms and systems may require a walking-back and reassessment to figure out what is necessary and what may be muddying the waters.

“It's like today, we came to work and we were in the office, and the following month we were remote,” Lynch says. “Nothing organizationally changed between February and March of 2020, where a lot of this happened… How many companies really said, ‘Okay, well, in the middle of a pandemic, we’ve got to deconstruct our company and reconstruct it around this remote.’”

Bohlin points out that while market-driven solutions are important, government support plays a crucial role in addressing the digital divide, especially in rural areas.

“There’s a government support role here because the market incentives, when you have at the same time competition, aren’t enough,” he says, noting that programs to improve broadband infrastructure are helping close the gap.

However, businesses can also step in by offering perks like subsidized internet access to employees who need it.