Employees’ opinions of their day-to-day experiences at a company are heavily influenced by technology
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, employee experience had always been a hot topic in HR, pushing some employers to jump right into implementing employee experience tactics they might have put off otherwise.
Employees’ opinions of their day-to-day experiences at a company are heavily influenced by technology. While the human touch is undeniably essential, evolving technologies and the digital revolution are powerful tools for company leaders to make substantial changes in the employee experience while also improving the bottom line.
What is Employee Experience?
Before describing what employee experience is, it’s probably a good idea to define what employee experience isn’t. Employee experience, according to Forbes, goes well beyond the notions of employee engagement, company incentives, or employer branding, and it is not regarded as a novel HR strategy.
Employee experience is defined by culture as the “people’s perceptions, feelings, and experiences through their employee journey at a company.”
“To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace,” remarked New York Times bestselling author and esteemed business leader Douglas Conant.
Importance of Technology in Employee Experience
Now, more than ever, employee experience is essential. Many organisations were seeking ways to better engage their staff, enhance employee retention, and differentiate themselves in the never-ending competition to attract the best talents even before the pandemic.
Sandoz, a market leader in generic and biosimilar medicines, noted the significance of employee experience and invested $50 million in their Global Head Office in Germany to enhance it.
To engage employees in the past, organisations concentrated on things like employee growth and development. However, many businesses were not collecting employee feedback, listening effectively, or interpreting the data. While there were annual — and occasionally more periodic — reviews and interactions, the data from these sessions was often more informal or couldn’t be consolidated in a way that could be utilized for analysis. This is now possible, thanks to modern technologies.
How to Improve Employee Experience with Technology
Technology may help improve the employee experience in a variety of ways. Analysts around the world have been speculating about this notion of the “firm of the future” since the beginning of the century, analyzing it to assist companies to prepare for it.
Today, companies must grapple with the need to digitize the workplace to survive in these tough times.
Here are five of the most effective methods:
- Implement Technology For Employee Engagement– Employee engagement technology will be the cornerstone of an employee listening strategy, and it will have a direct impact on the employee experience plan. Gathering employee input and evaluating aggregated feedback patterns over time to gauge the employee experience helps determine what needs to be improved and direct the measures to enhance it.
This could include gathering feedback on issues like benefits packages, a recently implemented policy or application, the current application landscape, or IT ticket response times.
- Improve Productivity– Improving staff productivity is one of the most significant wins for a company’s bottom line. Employees will be happier, more engaged, and more efficient as a result of combining technology with an effective employee experience strategy and adopting an organizational policy, as well as cultural changes based on feedback collected.
- Empower Employees -Giving employees the liberty, creative freedom, and digital tools they need to perform their jobs more efficiently is a strong approach to give them an engaging and gratifying experience. While policy and company culture decisions influence creative freedom and autonomy, equipping people with the tools they need to execute their jobs is a technological decision that achieves the same goal.
- Review Your Business Applications – Employees’ experiences are influenced by the business applications they use. These programs can range from standard systems like time and expense tracking, conferencing software, and ticketing tools to business-specific systems like inventory and data management.
Choosing the appropriate applications, installing them effectively, and integrating them throughout the application landscape will have a huge impact on how employees work. A primary goal should also be ensuring a uniform user experience across all company applications.
- Improve Collaboration– Collaboration tools have been increasingly popular in recent years, and studies demonstrate that they improve how people collaborate. Employee engagement and workplace communication solutions have been shown to make collaboration easier, which employees like.
A Deloitte study forecasts what the future of HR will look like in the coming years, with technology playing a key role in each of its tasks. HR will leverage technology to restructure how talent works, conduct organisational network analysis to gain workforce insights and go beyond hiring to nurture talent and encourage people, according to the report. In HR and at all employee touchpoints, technology has become universal.
The most important takeaway from these modern technologies is that they provide a more wholesome and fulfilling experience for employees. As a result, improved workplaces, communities, and truly better lifestyles are the ultimate goal.
