Exploring Employee Perspectives on Workplace Technology: Usage, Roles, and Implications for Satisfaction and Performance

In a dynamic context, where market requirements and needs change often, it is important for companies to adapt to new demands as quickly as possible to continue to be successful. To be able to face numerous challenges, however, organizations need to focus on the needs of their employees, with their satisfaction being an intermediate objective in achieving performance. Since technology is a pillar of each business field, the aim of this study is to explore employees' perspectives on the use of technology at work, analyzing its main roles within the company, the benefits it provides from the employees' viewpoint and its implications for satisfaction and performance. To achieve this objective, the authors used existing results in the literature that indicated several methods for the analysis of this subject, and continued with qualitative focus group research that involved six employees working both in hybrid and remote setups, within companies providing services in the engineering area. Thus, in this qualitative study, the needs and preferences of engineering employees are analyzed towards the efficiency of work activities, the improvement of team collaboration, as well as the role of digital technologies in facilitating communication and collecting feedback. Also, the research results address the support of personal and professional development and emphasize the importance of balance between personal and professional life through workplace flexibility-an aspect relatively unexplored in the specialized literature. Apart from the theoretical contributions that the study offers for the development of the literature, the results of this research offer a practical perspective for companies in the field of engineering, suggesting future research directions and recommendations for optimizing performance and increasing the level of employee satisfaction through the implementation of appropriate and personalized digital solutions.