As companies accelerate their digital transitions, employees detail a changed workplace

Workers adjusting to remote work are going to need new and better tools

The U.S.’s COVID-19 caseload continues to set records as major states move to re-shutter their economies in hopes of stemming its spread. For many workers the situation means more time in the home office and less time in their traditional workplace. My colleague Greg Kumparak spent some time talking to companies about how best to work remotely. You can read that on Extra Crunch here.

What the world will look like when safety eventually returns is not clear, but it’s becoming plain that the workplace will not revert to its old normal. New data details changed employee sentiment, showing that a good portion of the working world doesn’t want to get back to its pre-COVID commute, and, in many cases, is eyeing a move to a different city or state in the wake of the pandemic and its economic disruptions.


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The changing workplace has shifted — accelerated, you could say — demand for all sorts of products and services, from grocery delivery to software. The latter category of tools has seen quickening demand as the world moves to support newly remote workforces, helping keep them both productive and secure.

TechCrunch has covered the accelerating digital transformation — industry slang for companies moving to a more software-and-cloud world — before, noting that investors are making big bets on companies that might benefit from its ramping pace. Thanks to new data from a Twilio-led survey, we have a fresh look at that trend.

Undergirding the digital transformation is how today’s workers are adapting to remote work. If many workers don’t want to stop working from home, the gains that companies serving the digital transformation are seeing could prove permanent. New data from a Qualtrics-led survey may help us understand the new mindset of the domestic and global worker.

At the union of the two datasets is a lens into the future of not only how many information workers, to borrow an old phrase, will labor in the future, but how they’ll feel about it. So, this morning let’s explore the world through two data-driven lenses, helped as we go with notes from interviews with Qualtrics’ CEO Ryan Smith and Twilio’s chief customer officer, Glenn Weinstein.

What workers want

According to a Qualtrics survey, three in five, or 60% of respondents “who switched from working outside the home to remote work-at-home say they prefer working from home,” and only 25% of respondents under 55 years of age “actually want to go back to the office.” It’s perhaps little surprise, then, that the same dataset says that 41% of respondents indicated that their employers have “made permanent the option to work remotely at least some of the time.”

The survey collected data from 2,000 individuals in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Remote work has quickly gone from what felt like a small, albeit growing trend that some forward-looking companies were embracing, to the norm in quick order; if around two in five companies have already made long-term provisions for remote work, how many more will open to the possibility after more months of COVID lockdown?

In the good news column, more workers surveyed said that their productivity has been net-improved by the move to working from home, with 38% saying that they are now more productive, 40% saying that they are as productive as before and only 22% saying that they now are less productive.

More flexible work arrangements and good productivity results appear to be providing workers with more options than ever regarding where they work. According to the Qualtrics dataset, 43% of workers surveyed “have considered moving away from the city or state where they currently live because of changes to remote work” policies. And nearly a fifth (17%) have already “temporarily relocated” thanks to the same freedom. (Inside those who have moved or are considering it, 38% cited being closer to families and friends, while 37% cited costs of living; many, then, are looking for more fulfilled, less financially stressful lives. Perhaps remote work will lead to a general bump to worker contentment.)

The data may feel cut-and-dried, but there are important nuances to take into account. Qualtrics told TechCrunch during an interview that some of the positive feelings toward remote work could be powered by people perhaps not favoring remote work per se, but instead worrying about the safety of returning to the office. And, that some parents might be in favor of working from home at the moment given limited child care options. So, inside the data itself there are reporting cohorts that could give the data a more remote-friendly vibe than reality would dictate.

Still, how people will work has been shaken up, and forever. In an interview, Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith described the new working world, explaining his perspective on how the working world is changed for good:

I think that organizations are going to have to be proactive [in the new world]. There’s a couple of them that are really leading out. Toby from Shopify, Stewart from Slack — we’ve talked a lot, where they’re really trying to say, “Hey, we’re going to get ahead of this. And we’re actually going to drive it, rather than it driving us.” And I think that every organization should say, “What are you doing to reimagine?” Because if you go back the same way, it’s not gonna work. No, we’ve gone through a one way door.

That one way door to a different world means that old methods of working don’t, and new solutions are needed. This brings us back to the concept of digital transformation.

What employers are doing

TechCrunch has reported on the digital transformation’s acceleration twice in recent weeks. But before we had to peer into earnings reports and select CEO interviews to get a handle on what’s going on. New data from a Twilio survey provides a far clearer look into how things are changing.

Chew on the following data points sourced from mid-June — a blind survey of hundreds of corporate leaders from nine countries around the world, including Asian, European and North American companies:

  • 68% say that COVID-19 has sped up their digital transformation “a great deal,” with 29% more saying that it has sped up the work “somewhat.”
  • The average number of estimated years that COVID-19 has accelerated a company’s digital transformation is six.
  • Digital communications “transformation efforts” are accelerating, with 96% of respondents saying that their companies have “drastically” or “somewhat” sped up this particular effort. Further, 46% said that “transforming digital communications” is “extremely critical” while another 46% say that the work is “very critical.”
  • More money is now available for digital transformation efforts, with 26% of respondents saying that their corporate budgets for the work have “increased dramatically” while another 53% said that their budget has “increased somewhat.”

A faster digital transformation means more tooling, faster, with bigger budgets it appears. The survey also highlights the barriers that COVID-19 has broken down in companies to get on with modernizing their toolings and comms.

Even in industries that are struggling, it turns out. Twilio’s CCO Glenn Weinstein told TechCrunch that “a really striking finding of the survey is that regardless of industry — even in industries that are taking a short-term hit and we know will come back … even in those industries there’s an imperative now to accelerate digital transformation and in particular, digital communications as part of that transformation.”

Weinstein added later in the same conversation that “a lot of” the change that we’re discussing “is permanent.” This matches what we saw from our first dataset; the world will not go back to how it was.

What about startups?

Let’s bring this all home to TechCrunch’s focus on high-growth private companies. For startups, COVID has brought with it a changing market landscape, splitting upstart firms into two groups. In the first there are startups that have caught a wave from COVID-19’s market disruptions. These startups, often companies that are riding the accelerating digital transformation, are attractive to investors. Those startups that are not seeing a COVID bump are less attractive than they once were, either in absolute (slowing growth) or comparative (slowing growth compared to COVID-accelerated peers) terms.

Put another way, the accelerating digital transformation is sorting the startup world into two buckets, and only one is attractive to investors.

That situation, coupled to our analyzed data indicating that the world isn’t going to go back to the way it was, implies that some startups have caught a long-lasting secular wave. The rest could become has-beens. So, expect to see startups look to pivot toward tools and products and services that could get them a slice of the digital transformation. And expect to see some startups that can’t make the pivot simply wither on the vine.