The employee experience was already a trending topic in human resource (HR) departments even before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed some companies to dive headfirst into executing employee experience strategies they otherwise would have waited to implement.
Employee experience with technology plays a critical role in how employees feel about their day-to-day experience at an organization. It is still true that an effective employee experience strategy must include several major components besides technology, such as workplace culture, HR policies and the physical surroundings. While human intervention is undeniably important, emerging technologies and digital transformation are critical tools for business leaders to drive meaningful change in the employee experience and enhance the bottom line.
The importance of employee experience technology
Happy, engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave. Customer-facing employees become ambassadors for their business and this, in turn, drives a better customer experience. Happy customers often make repeat purchases and continue the business relationship longer.
Even before the pandemic, many employers were looking at ways to better engage their workforce, improve employee retention and differentiate themselves in the constant battle to attract the best talent. Previously, companies focused on things such as employee self-service and learning and development to keep employees engaged.
However, today, technology has become central to employee experience in any organisation whether IT oriented or not. Employee experience technology is a worker’s perception about the technology he/she interacts with in a company. Employee experience will depend on how efficient the technology is. Is it getting in the way of employees being productive? Does it frustrate the workers? Are their too many procedures to follow for a simple task? These questions when answered provides a comprehensive perception of an employee’s experience with technology at the workplace.
How to improve the employee experience with technology
The employee experience can be improved in many ways through the use of technology. It may be through a product that functions as a de facto employee experience platform covering most of the touchpoints in the employee lifecycle in an integrated workflow across systems, such as ServiceNow. Or, the technology could instead be one of the more narrowly focused employee experience apps known to have the most impact, such as an intranet or a collaboration tool.
Here are six ways in which you can leverage technology to improve employee experience
- Implement an Employee Engagement Technology
Technology dedicated to boosting engagement will be the cornerstone of an employee listening strategy and will directly influence the employee experience strategy. Gathering feedback from the workforce and analyzing the aggregated feedback trends over time to measure the employee experience will influence exactly what needs to be changed and help guide the steps to improve it. This could include collecting feedback on topics such as benefits options, a new policy or application that was rolled out, the existing application landscape or IT ticket-response times.
- Improve Productivity
One of the biggest winners for a business and the bottom line is to improve employee productivity. By using employee experience technology — combined with an effective employee listening strategy — and implementing organizational, policy and culture changes based on the feedback received, employees will be happier, more engaged and more productive.
- Empower Employees
Giving employees the autonomy, creative freedom and digital tools to do their job more effectively is a powerful way to provide employees with an experience that they will find exciting and rewarding. While creative freedom and autonomy come from policy and corporate culture decisions, providing employees with the tools to do their job is a technology decision that serves the same ends.
- Review your Portfolio of Business Applications
Not every aspect of improving the employee experience involves implementing employee experience technology. Every business application an employee uses impacts their experience. These applications can range from common systems such as time entry and expense management, conferencing and video software, and service delivery and ticketing tools to business-specific applications, such as an inventory management or content management system. Procuring the best applications, correctly implementing them and integrating them across the application landscape will make a significant difference in how employees work. Ensuring a consistent user experience across enterprise applications should also be a top priority
- Improve collaboration
Collaboration tools have become all the rage in recent years, and studies show they do, in fact, enhance the way employees work together. Tools such as Microsoft Teams have been proved to make working together easier, which is something that employees welcome.
Get your IT team to integrate a collaboration tool that will help you team stay connected even during the time they work from home.
- Optimize self-services
Self-service capabilities in HR and non-HR systems provide significant time savings for the business, but the applications must be simple to use. If the system requires significant effort, such as needing a manual or the help of a colleague, they often will not be used. Lack of use, in turn, brings data-integrity issues or motivates employees to seek workarounds that only redistribute the workload elsewhere. In some cases, an employee may only need to change their personal data, view their pay slip or look up another employee on the org chart. Ensuring that the system works well, can be accessed on mobile devices and has simple workflows that can easily be followed to completion will create easy wins.
Engage with your IT service provider to analyse business processes and suggest tools that are easy to deploy and integrate within your organization’s culture. An effective service provider will also possess the capabilities to custom design applications that fits like a glove into your company motivating employees to use the app and not be burdened by it.
CSG Technologies is adept in helping companies meet their IT needs effortlessly. From business process analysis to management, implementing collaborations tools to encapsulating all departments in a secure intranet environment, we have helped leading companies meet their employee experience technology concerns head on. We recently helped a global shipping company manage their on-shore and off-shore communication seamlessly in an environment where network was inconsistent, and collaboration was key to ensure accurate logistics. Contact us to if you are looking to improve your employee experience technology environment too.
