Employee productivity and well-being

Realizing that our collaborators have diverse needs allows us to understand the conditions in which they can carry out their work. There are those who should take care of minors in their homes, as well as the elderly. Others will likely not have the required technological conditions. In short, all variables must be taken into account to understand what employees need to remain productive and add value to their jobs.

In this sense, what many companies are doing is identifying those roles and jobs that could have mixed business models. Some departments may require greater communication with their customers, both internally and externally, as their functions cannot always be carried out through digital channels. On the one hand, members of fields such as accounting, technology, and human resources, among others, have greater potential to migrate to permanently distant or mixed business models.

For this group of companies, which are not part of production processes, the biggest challenge of the past year – and it will continue – is undoubtedly how to measure productivity; Especially in those jobs that were not previously measured, because they were carried out in an office. With this understanding, companies must efficiently manage productivity under mixed business models. And in this business, technology can be of great help.

For their part, companies that require people in the workplace face the huge challenge of fostering a culture of self-care and risk management among their employees. At the start of the pandemic, this involved convincing some workers that the health emergency was really affecting themselves and their families. Companies have done a lot to understand the culture of personal safety; However, it is a task that must be intensified, for example, with tools that allow them to manage the risk of infection.

In both scenarios, technology is an important ally. For example, at PwC we have developed a tool that allows employers to identify changes in people’s current health status and get a real-time view of their work status. This type of system helps companies that focus on production processes identify trends by business units, detect collaborators who may have been in contact with infected persons and more accurately identify who may be infected. This information allows leaders to take immediate action and not shut down an entire business unit, for example, but isolate a group of workers who might be at risk and apply necessary tests.