In today’s customer-centric business world, it’s easy to forget that there are other stakeholders that enable an organization to thrive. Not to downplay the importance of modelling your operations around customer needs, but the other aspects of the business are equally important. Let’s talk about employee experience.
Imagine being in the final stages of recruiting for a high-stakes role – maybe for a top technical position or an executive appointment. The company needs a particular candidate on board. One of the conditions for employment, interestingly, is choice of technology. The prospective hire will only work with a specific platform or ecosystem. Can your organization adapt enough to land this potential leader?
Being able to nominate a platform preference to ensure an employee is as productive as they can be is becoming increasingly commonplace, as we’ve seen through our work customers across all industries. It hasn’t always been the case, however. We can trace this phenomenon to the shift from BlackBerry devices to iPhones among top business executives in the late 2000s. Before that, IT leaders in companies chose the “best” platform for the entire organization based on several deciding factors, such as cost, compatibility with existing software, and industry benchmarks, and that was that. Staff experience ranked very low on the list of priorities that played into technology choice back when IT was known as the Department of No. Thankfully, times have changed.
This practice of empowering employees with choice is not blind adherence to a business fad either – there’s data backing up the argument for it. Deploying M1-equipped Macs, for example, has been documented to improve retention in organizations by 20%, reduce start-up times by 80%, slash support ticket volumes, and result in 105 hours of increased productivity per user annually.* The bottom line for these numbers is that employees report higher satisfaction and a higher likelihood of staying with the company – just what you’re looking for in an era of increased global competition for talent. As leaders give workers the power of choice, they also help create a healthier, more robust organization.
It’s not even an argument about whether you need to make a complete switch from one platform to another. Some operating systems are more suited for certain applications than others, and we in the industry are very aware of this fact. There are legacy apps that were made to work only with a specific ecosystem. Certain types of hardware are perceived to cost more than others. Some platforms can seem more complicated to deploy, manage, or support. These are friction points that we often encounter when we provide device management solutions to our customers.
The point is to keep the option open for staff who have a preferred platform and know that they will be more productive because they don’t have to learn the ropes of a foreign system.
With most specialized on-prem apps such as accounting, HR information systems, and productivity suites moving to the cloud, the legacy compatibility debacle matters less and less with every infrastructure upgrade cycle. The cost discussion, upon investigation, becomes more and more a matter of perception. For instance, a MacBook Air starts at $1,299, while a PC can cost anywhere between $700 and $3,500, depending on specifications. Additionally, businesses that have opened their device pool to include Macs and iPhones also realized that they reduced deployment expenditures, cut management and support costs, and halved the risk of a data breach in their environment.
For green-oriented organizations, the reduced carbon footprint per Apple device is also a significant benefit. From design and production that produce less waste to actual usage throughout their lifetime, M1 Macs, Forrester has discovered, create a fraction of CO2 emissions compared to similar devices.
As the cultural zeitgeist around work continues to evolve, employee-centricity will become an even more defining element of the organizational fabric. We will see more and more companies leverage technology to champion staff satisfaction, acquire and retain talent, and offer accessibility to all.
Is your organization ready to embrace the power of choice and adopt Mac using Apple’s best practices? The Mac Evaluation Utility makes it easy to securely and privately assess your environment. Click here to connect with our team with any questions you have or book a workshop today
*The Total Economic Impact™ Of Mac In Enterprise: M1 Update. Forrester. July 2021.