Canadian employees think workplace tech tools aren’t the sharpest in the shed

A new survey done on behalf of Zoho finds that while a significant majority of Canadian employees are happy with their companies’ corporate goals and their work in general, most are not happy with their technology, whether they are working in the office or remotely.

LSP Chandrasekhar, Zoho’s Canadian Evangelist

A new Canadian survey sponsored by Cloud software suite vendor Zoho has found that even though Canadian employees today are highly aligned with their companies’ goals and satisfied with management, they are quite dissatisfied with the efficiency of the technology tools they use at work.

The survey was conducted on behalf of Zoho by Beagle Research Group in April 2020, and polled employees in non-executive and non-managerial role at 208 Canadian businesses, which represented a broad cross-section of companies. It found that 64% do not think their technology helps them be productive, either while working in the office, or remotely. Things are worse in businesses with under 500 employees, where more than two-thirds of staff lack confidence in their tech and another 88% said it takes too long to build systems to support their job. 59% of salespeople said that they lack confidence in their tech infrastructure.

LSP Chandrasekhar, Zoho’s Canadian Evangelist, said that while the survey indicated that employees were unhappy with their technology at work, they were happy with their overall work environment.

“It’s a very interesting insight, in that while technology seems to be an area of concern for a lot of the employees, there is also a lot of pride in how employees approached their work,” he said.

Most of the survey respondents said that they feel engaged and aligned with their employers’ business and think their management is competent. 73% said that they have a sense of purpose in their work. 70% per cent say they take pride in their job. 66% stated their boss is knowledgeable and communicates clearly, and 64% say it’s easy to align their work with the business’s objectives.

“Given this level of engagement, the issues with the technology are notable,” Chandrasekhar said. “The survey specifically asked people if it was chaotic to get things done, and the answers indicated that they had to poke around with multiple integrated systems to do what they wanted to do.”

The survey’s bottom line, Chandrasekhar stated, is that the easiest way for Canadian companies to improve their productivity, given that their staffs are already motivated, is to improve their technology.

“The survey highlights that the area of improvement that a company needs to do most is improve their technology infrastructure,” he said.