Over 4 million U.S. citizens reportedly quit their jobs in September 2021. Some economists have referred to this as the ‘September exodus.’ This pattern has also been seen in other high-income countries, and effect of this has been to place intense pressure on organizations to understand their failures in employee retention.
One of the main factors driving employees to quit, as an analysis of exit interviews suggests, is frustration with IT practices (coupled with the other frustrations that have emanated from the COVID-19 economic response). This relates to both wider corporate systems to finnicky laptops and networks. These issues are further hampered by a lack of tools to remediate the technology challenges when they arise.
The issues further suggest that with the changes in working practices triggered by the response to the coronavirus pandemic (like home working and hybrid working) then traditional personal computers and laptops are not always reliable or powerful enough to meet the challenges of this new era of remote work.
For these reasons, a trend among many companies is to seek out cloud alternatives to support remote and hybrid workers.
This trend has been picked up by Amitabh Sinha, CEO & Cofounder of Workspot, as he tells Digital Journal.
According to Sinha one of the merging trends is with Desktop as a Service (DaaS) technology. Sinha thinks that this approach can help to support employee retention.
Sinha sets out the context: “With remote work, IT organizations have been under more pressure than ever to provision secure access to the applications and data employees need to be productive. It comes as no surprise as we see trends, like the ‘great resignation’ (with over four million people leaving their current jobs), with a common theme – reality vs expectations of employee experience.”
This brings with it considerable challenges, says Sinha: “Many organizations continue to leverage traditional approaches like shipping PCs and laptops, which have become harder to secure and manage when they are outside the network perimeter.”
There are other difficulties too: “A similar challenge rises when leveraging an on prem VDI environment, which is costly and complex to scale and can result in poor performance for remote workers.”
However, changes are happening Sinha reveals: “Faced with poor performance, employees are demanding more from their end user computing experience. Ease of use and flexibility in devices seem is becoming a must have for remote and hybrid workers today, a trend that is here to stay. Results of our survey with ESG shows the need for increased adoption of digital workspaces. In fact, 88% of respondents said they wanted to access VDI/DaaS images via smartphones and non-Windows devices.”
These trends leads Sinha to conclude: “In this context, cloud PCs have proven to be the better alternative, providing improved performance and security to better support remote work, while helping organizations retain and attract talent with easy to use and easy to onboard capabilities.”
