teleworking has made it easier for employees to use digital tools

Video conferences, instant messaging groups, collaborative document sharing or workflow management tools. For many employees, all this represented somewhat vague concepts, techniques that some in the company used, but which had not come into the daily work. A year later, progress has been made. No less than 40% of employees say that their digital skills have improved during the various confinements. This is what emerges from a study carried out by the PWC firm, carried out on more than 32,000 employees in 19 countries.

The Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research says it: for two out of five teleworkers, handling these tools was a first. Half of new remote workers have used video conferencing when they have never done so before. It is also Teams that is most often used, ahead of Zoom, far ahead of Whatsapp and Google Meets. Finally, 40% have discovered shared document management and 37% have adopted instant messaging, which was foreign to them.

In this acceleration of the digitalization of companies – Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, believes that we have achieved “two years of digitalization in two months” – 77% of employees say that they are ready to acquire new skills and to be fully trained. They are very optimistic about the outcome of this movement: 80% of them are convinced that they can adapt to new technologies in their workplace.

There is a clear difference between employees who have a higher education qualification and those who do not. A difference of simple to double when we ask them if their employer gives them opportunities to train in digital: 46% of the best educated say yes, against 28% for the others.

The authors of the PWC study draw the attention of public authorities to the fact that improving digital skills risks increasing social inequalities, when it should do exactly the opposite.