In today’s competitive workforce, employees are taking control of their own career outcomes. They have plenty of choices when it comes to picking their roles and employers.
If you’re an employer, you probably already know that It costs more money to hire and train new employees than it does to retain the good ones you already have!
At the highest level, “employee experience” is derived from a simple equation. As an employer, are we meeting employee expectations in terms of needs and wants in the workplace? Depending on how well we do with this, the employee will feel a certain level of happiness. This is what we want to maximize!
The new Citrix Workspace service offerings maximize employee experience through interactions with technology. Heightening the employee experience translates into better results for talent retention, talent acquisition and employee NPS scoring.
The Amazon Analogy
Why should you care about employee experience? When was the last time you bought something of value from Amazon WITHOUT looking at the ratings and/or reviews? I bet it’s been a while.
Amazon has put power back into the hands of consumers. Poor quality products are easily exposed.
Apply the same theory to the workplace. Thanks to LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Fortune, and others, it’s extremely easy for potential employees (and current employees) to research and provide reviews of employers.
A bad score undoubtedly makes it difficult to attract top talent and retain valued employees. Why would they join an organization or remain at their current employer if they can be happier somewhere else?
Employee experience includes everything from free gym memberships to Taco Tuesdays. Citrix solutions can’t help you there. However, a big part of employee experience also has to do with an employee’s ability to interact with technology, be more productive, and work from the comfortable setting of their choice.
It’s also important to realize that a typical workforce varies demographically: a great experience for one employee, such as the option of working from home, may not be a great experience for another employee. For this reason, we need to make sure choice and flexibility are common characteristics for the workspace solutions we offer the end user.
How can the Citrix Workspace help?
The new Citrix Workspace offerings are designed with three key pillars in mind. Experience, choice and security.
Citrix Workspace solutions provide benefits to both the end-user and IT. Providing integrated solutions that mask complexity, provide unlimited choice and deliver transparent security equates to a great experience for all employees regardless of their demographic and/or device choice.
Look at all these applications in the graphic “Workspace App delivers ALL apps.” SaaS apps, mobile apps, virtualized apps and desktops, distributed data sources: all of this can get pretty complex. As BYOD continues to grow in popularity, delivering and accessing all these applications and the large amounts of data from a personally owned device can get even MORE complex and cluttered.
The Citrix Workspace app allows your users to access all of their applications and data through a single point of entry — one password gives them access to their entire workspace and to their files, regardless of the location. Even if an associated app isn‘t natively installed, with Citrix Workspace, the user can open it anyway.
Not only is this simple, but also, it’s secure. A single point of entry to your workspace reduces the available attack surface. What do you think is safer and easier to protect, a house with one door or a house with 20 doors?
Access should be fast and easy
Workspace access should be immediate, comprehensive, and agnostic to your device choice and/or physical location.
Three pieces of information: User Name, Password and Domain. That’s all you’ll need to remember to access all of your applications, desktops and files from any device or browser with the Citrix Workspace.
“Favorite” and “Most Recent” apps, desktops and files easily can be accessed as you switch from device to device and move throughout your day.
Out of the box integration with over 50 top SaaS vendors provides single sign on access from the Citrix Workspace app thus reducing the time it takes to navigate from one application to the next.
Streamlined workflows increase productivity
Because Citrix owns and delivers an entire Workspace technology stack, it’s much easier to build integrations between layers of the stack. Integration enables users to complete tasks with fewer clicks of the mouse (or taps on a mobile device). Less “jumping around” on the device.
Employees like to be creative, however, if Workspace tools provided to the end-user don’t facilitate productivity, the result is less time to be creative and more time spent on process. The Workspace app streamlines workflows by reducing the number of steps required to complete a task. Everything is right there at your fingertips.
Here’s a look at the Citrix Workspace app home screen. You can see a collection of apps, desktops and files.
The ”Search” icon on the top allows users to search their entire workspaces through a single engine.
“Recents” and “Favorites” boost productivity by allowing users to bypass the search engine entirely.
More than anything else, Workspace apps enhances productivity because everything is in one place and it is accessed with a simple one-time password.
Employee engagement and interaction should be encouraged
Employees who are engaged with the organization will put more effort into their work… but increasingly we see engagement as a measure of how employees interact with one another and the ease by which they’re able to collaborate on common initiatives. Citrix Workspace continues to be developed with user collaboration as a core use case.
Here are a few proof points the highlight some popular ways Citrix Workspace facilitates user collaboration.
Enterprise-grade Citrix Content Collaboration (formerly ShareFile) capabilities are available through the Citrix Workspace app. Not only is it easy to access files, but also, it’s easy to initiate workflows with others. In this example (above) on the left hand side you’ll see all of the various actions we’re able to take with the document. Not only can the user initiate workflow and request feedback/approvals from others, but also, Citrix Files allows users to “Check Out” the document during the approval process to ensure proper versioning controls.
The second example shows Slack integration with Citrix Secure Mail. Employees — particularly those in the millennial demographic — are spending more time on collaboration platforms that provide instant communication with co-workers. Slack is a great example. Leveraging Secure Mail as part of your Citrix Workspace allows users to easily work between both email and Slack to maximize speed, communication and collaboration with others.
The final example shows integration between Secure Mail and Content Collaboration. The most common mobile uses cases are accessing email and accessing/sending files. By integrating the two applications, workflows are streamlined and productivity is enhanced.
The freedom of choice
Limiting device choice can have a negative impact on employee experience. Are you a Mac user or a Windows user? I’ll bet you have a preference. I also bet that you can work much faster on one versus the other.
Citrix Workspace app, available from any web browser, has a consistent look and feel and is available on all major device types and operating systems including iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Chrome as well as HTML. This is really important. It means that now you can offer employees a BYOD program that includes all device types.
The ability to manage all of these devices is supported through Citrix Endpoint Management. For iOS and Android operating systems, Citrix Workspace supports a MAM-only for BYOD devices. Citrix MAM-only deployment options are completely MDM independent giving users the personal privacy they expect when using a personally owned device.
Finally, as part of Citrix Workspace offerings, Content Collaboration/Citrix Files provides connectors to all popular file stores and services.
With Citrix Workspace and Workspace app, employees will relish in the freedom of choice.
Security they’ll barely notice
Workspace security is not optional. However, if not implemented properly, security can have negative impacts on employee productivity and employee experience.
Security needs to happen behind the scenes. Ideally, users will hardly know it’s there. When delivering various workspace services to the end-user, third party integration can make security more complicated.
Citrix Workspace delivers the highest levels of security, end-to-end, with a minimal amount of required user interaction.
Although you’re probably not ready to move away from passwords completely, we can maximize the user experience by reducing the number of user names/passwords they’re required to remember.
Passwords are notorious pain points for the organization. They’re responsible for most security breaches and comprise the largest percentage of Help Desk requests.
With the Citrix Workspace single password approach, you can reduce security risks and improve help desk productivity by significantly reducing support calls.
On the back end, Citrix offers a comprehensive set of Workspace security features including 256 bit AES encryption, secure containers, deep packet inspection/filtering, security controls for SaaS applications, automated and actionable security policies and so much more.
While security should be transparent to the user, Citrix Workspace development also is focused on automating security processes for IT.
Citrix Analytics pulls data from Citrix Workspace services to build security profiles based on user behavior. Think of it like a credit score that can go up or down. Citrix Analytics integrates with Citrix Endpoint Management to provide closed-loop security that can automatically take specific actions when defined security thresholds are exceeded.
Here’s an example: Let’s suppose it’s 3AM and an employee is downloading 20 GB of corporate files. This sounds like a probable data leakage scenario. Without any manual intervention by IT, Citrix Workspace with Citrix Analytics can take a variety of actions with this device/user including notifications, lock, wipe, selective wipe or session recording.
Automating security processes wherever possible adds to employee experience for IT. Freeing up time for them to work on more creative and exciting initiatives.
Let’s recap
Citrix Workspace was designed with employee experience in mind:
- Faster access and onboarding.
- Greater productivity through integrated workflows.
- Advanced collaboration that makes engaging with colleagues easy and fun.
- Unlimited choice enabling employees to work from their favorite device types regardless of location, cloud or network.
- Enterprise-grade security that won’t slow you down.
With a thriving job market, job seekers now have more options than ever before. Employers compete for top talent and strive for employee retention through the employee experience they’re able to provide.
Click HERE to request a live demonstration of the Citrix Workspace from your local account team.
