Progress — it’s the key ingredient that many organizations miss in their recipe for fostering a thriving employee experience and an engaged workforce. Engagement is the outcome of a continued positive employee experience, and executive teams know that an engaged workforce is indispensable for the continued growth of their businesses. In fact, 74 percent of executives anticipate significant ROI from an improved employee experience. And with good reason: Engaged employees deliver better customer experiences and increased discretionary effort and are less likely to leave the company.

In her book The Progress Principle, Dr. Theresa Amabille examined human motivation and engagement. She demonstrated in her research that pay, perks, and bonuses — those extrinsic factors we all know are important — weren’t the most important thing for people. What was? Making progress in their work. Her research showed that employee emotions are most positive, and motivation is highest, when people feel they’re making headway in their jobs or when they get support that helps them overcome obstacles. Conversely, their mood and motivation are lowest when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to progress.

Most of us don’t live, or work, in a vacuum. Unless you’re a sole proprietor, your progress is intertwined with others on your team, or with teams in different business functions across your company. Effective collaboration is critical.

Technology plays an outsized role every day in our ability to get work done — as individuals, as teams, and as people who contribute to processes. The emergence of hybrid work, accelerated by COVID-19, made effective collaboration technology more important than ever as employees required a remote experience that was consistent with their experience in the office.

Citrix has just launched a digital experience, which includes our Thrive with Employee Experience report, that is helping leadership teams develop a deeper understanding of EX, offering clear tactics to help you operationalize it within your organization and create an effective flexible remote work strategy. In this research, we asked nearly 800 EX-focused leaders which technologies have the strongest positive impact on employee experience as their organization aims to create adaptable, sustainable work models. Collaboration platforms were the No. 1 choice.

I’ve been excited about the addition of Wrike to the Citrix family for so many reasons. One of the biggest is that we can help individual employees advance their work by delivering a consistent, secure, and simplified experience with Citrix Workspace and help teams collectively achieve the same progress with Wrike.

In a recent webinar, Wrike customer Aaron Senne from Dish Wireless emphasized that collaboration technology must deliver an excellent experience. If some teams use it and others don’t, progress is compromised. They’ve seen broad adoption of Wrike, which has helped teams move their work forward.

In that same session, Chris Ruscoe of PwC US’s Technology, Intellectual Property & Data Group, said that, with Wrike, teams have a better understanding of what they’re doing because it’s a single source of truth. And David Boyll of Oracle Studio shared how Wrike freed employees from expending extra effort for task tracking and status updates. EX assessments of businesses I’ve worked with over the years often show that not having ready access to the data they need frustrates employees. At Oracle Studio, employees were able to leverage Wrike to liberate and share siloed data that existed on individual employees’ machines.

My own progress is linked to so many others here at Citrix. Like every other company, we’re on our own journey to foster a thriving employee experience and unlock the potential of individuals and teams. I quickly became a Wrike user and have been excited about how it’s transforming the processes that I’m part of.

The addition of Wrike to Citrix opens new opportunities to unleash the power of collaborative work to create a great employee experience. To help you with your broader EX strategy, take advantage of our EX resources, which include the full Thrive with Employee Experience report. In the report, available free to download, you’ll learn more about empowering progress, as well as how to deepen empathy and partner effectively — and get insights into how to you can infuse EX into your culture, services, technology, governance, and more.

Together, Citrix and Wrike look forward to helping your employees progress as individuals and as a part of winning teams. Learn more about Wrike and try it for free.