This is a guest blog post from Tamara McCleary, CEO at Thulium.co.

Are you feeling extraordinarily busy at work and yet find yourself continually exporting more things on your to-do list to tomorrow’s agenda because you just couldn’t get to it today? How about those last-minute requests from your boss or your clients that the glorious technology called text messaging ushers into your life? (Oh who are we kidding? These kinds of demands-by-text crash our nights and our weekends, too! We are living into an always-on, 24×7 modern workplace.)

We are more tired (dare I say some of us reaching burnout), overstretched, and overwhelmed than ever before. How is the promise of technology offloading your mundane tasks working for you? How has multitasking lied to all of us?

If you missed the webcast on exactly this topic and the juicy discussion on decreasing efficiencies, productivity, and engagement by not only ourselves, but our employees, and you crave to gain back a little bit of sanity, click here for the replay.

After our webcast, so many questions came to mind for me that I asked my colleague and “workplace distraction” subject matter expert, Vishal Ganeriwala, who is also Senior Director of Product Marketing Workspace Services at Citrix, to answer a few follow-up questions.

Vishal, the webinar went by so quickly! Could you speak to how we can simplify the employee experience for faster decision-making?
In our everyday consumer life, we can get instant answers from Google Assistant for GPS directions or for the score of our favorite sports team. However, our work experience is very different. We all spend countless hours searching and context switching between apps to get key insights and to complete task. We need a consumer-simple experience that can help us automate routine tasks and bring key insights to us for faster decision making. Mobile app experience and bots would be one way to do it. Our higher-ranking execs have personal assistants who take care of things like meeting schedules, expenses, and travel bookings. Now, imagine providing a similar experience via a virtual assistant to all employees.

What key technology components do you think are needed to overcome workforce productivity challenges?
I am going to use another everyday example. How many times have you walked up to a business hub and stared blankly at the dozens of buttons, when all you really needed was to make a copy? Unfortunately, enterprise software is designed in a similar way. Billions of dollars have been spent on applications designed for the work scenarios and actions that 1 percent of users need instead of being designed for what 99 percent of us actually use. Technology aimed to simplify work has made work more complex. All these factors contribute to disengagement and lost productivity.

At Citrix, we are focused on building these “green button” experiences by bringing together all the essential technology components like endpoint management, content collaborations, virtual apps and desktops, and identity and access control so the end user can stay focused on value-creating work. Technology should help organize, guide, and automate work for the end users while providing the security and visibility that IT needs.

How can the right tools maximize talent and enhance productivity?
A survey by Jive Communications found that 70 percent of the 2,000 millennials polled said they would quit a job if lacked high performing and fast technology. And according to a Gallup survey, 37 percent of workers would quit and take a new job that allowed them to work remotely part of the time.

In today’s competitive world, hiring and retaining the best talent means giving them access to the best tools and technology. Successful leaders understand these dynamics, and they are investing in digital workspace technologies to enable users to be productive, no matter which device or location they work from. The workforce is increasingly mobile and remote, and the right technology tools enable us to securely access the apps and data we need to get our job done.

Citrix Workspace can help with delivering key information — such as a change in sales pipeline or a progression in a sales opportunity — without making them go into the application itself. The idea is to help people get work done quickly and move on by simplifying common workflows and modernizing the way that people engage with many different apps, with the outcome being a significantly better and more productive experience.

We know from previous studies that increasing employee engagement also increases customer satisfaction. What are you and Citrix seeing with respect to this association between employee engagement and customer satisfaction?
We engaged with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and conducted a study that revealed IT has a much larger role to play in leading employee experience than is typically understood. In fact, IT and HR leaders feel equally responsible for employee experience. Across industries and geographies, organizations are finding — and proving — that a better employee experience leads directly to improved business results such as enhanced customer satisfaction, improved profitability, increased employee engagement and productivity, and lower workforce turnover.

What were some of the results that most impressed or surprised you with respect to the EIU survey?
Of the people who took the survey, 43 percent said improved employee experience resulted in improved productivity, and 36 percent said improved employee experience resulted in improved customer satisfaction.

If this topic touches a chord of truth in your own experience, leave your comments below and read my two previous posts, How to innovate with the attention span of a goldfish and What’s crushing productivity in your organization and how to fix it. And check out these resources for more on productivity, digital workspaces, and the employee experience.