Global Recruitment Experts HAYS Talent Solutions have polled over 14,500 working professionals to uncover the key mindset for digital transformation in the workplace, in their latest report: What Workers Want.

More than 90 percent of UK workers believe technology will change their workplace and everyday lives for the better.

A culture that embraces digital change and innovation is an integral factor that workers want from their current employers, with half believing advances in digital technology will allow people to add greater human value to organisations in the future.

In 2020, technological advances in the form of automation are steadily being adopted across many levels in numerous sectors including marketing, finance and supply chains, and UK workers are more enthusiastic about using digital technology at work than in their personal lives.

Today, 73 percent of employees have an open mindset towards digital transformation in the workplace, but less than half are satisfied with the pace of their organisations’ technological change.

Around 20 percent feel the technological change is happening too fast, with over a third stating there needs to be more training, despite more than 55 percent of businesses introducing internal training and improving employee communications.

Over half of companies feel staff are under-skilled for digital transformation

According to the poll, over half of employers across all sectors expect to come up against a lack of skills from the current workforce. Despite over a third of Generation Z, 32 percent of men and 21 percent of women believe they are ‘experts’ when it comes to using technology, 41 percent of employees and 30 percent of employers say providing support with training and upskilling is the most important way for a business to prepare for automation.

Regardless, many employers are still struggling to adopt a strategy that incorporates technological change, such as automation. Currently, only nine percent of employers feel they would experience no challenges when trying to implement automation within their organisation, but 90 percent of the barriers and challenges that employers expect to encounter include:

• Lack of skills from current staff (58 percent)
• Lack of support from staff (37 percent)
• Need for additional budget (31 percent)
• Requirement of new processes (26 percent)
• Difficulty integrating with different departments (24 percent)
• Insufficient internal training (22 percent)