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“Employees who believe that management is concerned about them as a whole person – not just an employee – are more productive, more satisfied, more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability.” – Anne M. Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox
Your employees’ experience in and with your organisation has a direct impact on their wellbeing and performance. Consequently, employee engagement affects your business’ productivity and bottom line. To ensure the best employee experience, your organisation needs to curate it from recruitment right up to the alumni level.
Technology has started to play an important role in the talent-organisation journey, influencing potential candidate’s job choices, how they experience the workplace, and their connection to the organisation as alumni members. Thus, modern employers have to imagine practical ways to improve the employee experience through technology.
The benefits of technology for the employee experience
Employee experience expert, Ben Whitter, identifies technology as an essential driver in modern business’ efforts to provide advanced employee experiences. By introducing technology for the employee experience, you can reap the following benefits for your business:
- Simplified and streamlined tasks
- Reduced workload
- Increased productivity
- Enhanced wellbeing and reduced stress
- Better customer service
- More satisfied employees
However, introducing new technologies can also have its pitfalls if implemented without thought and strategy. A poorly integrated employee technology system can result in an alienating experience for your workers. As an employer, you need to balance the introduction and use of technology, with a personal, and still human, connection with your employees.
Whitter proposes that technological advances in the workplace should prioritise human need. This balance is best achieved by creating a mindful and directed plan. Here are six techniques you can use to develop your strategy while striking the right balance.
6 ways to improve employee experience through technology
1. Recruitment systems
Employees increasingly consider the technologies available in a potential workplace before opting to accept the job or not. Thus, career decisions and technology work hand-in-hand.
You can update your recruitment procedures in various ways to improve HR efficiency. You could, for instance, use digital recruitment channels to indicate a digitally-connected institution. Alternatively, your recruitment representatives should demonstrate to candidates what kind of employee technology your business offers.
Of course, to remain successful in recruiting the best talent, you must also have the best technological systems in place…
2. Day-to-day work tools
‘Can you email to a fax number?’
Updating work tools and educating workers on advancements removes uncertainty around what they can or cannot achieve. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and many other technologies are now available to simplify employee tasks and lighten their workload.
With RPA, your workers can automate simple and repetitive tasks that are important but tend to take a lot of time to handle. CRM assists in streamlining and managing customer relationships and interactions, making it easy for employees to access important data for sales, services provision, meetings, and more.
Tools like a virtual phone service for small business also make internal and customer communications easier to facilitate. Introducing wearable AR and VR tech can lead to a safer and smarter work environment by allowing employees to perceive their space more clearly. Using the above technologies and more, your business can enhance workers’ experience, improve customer service, and increase productivity.
3. Collaboration & communication software
Collaboration software, like these Bitrix competitors, has become an intrinsic part of the workplace in the past year, as companies needed to enable collaboration and communication during the pandemic. Collaboration software boosts principles of teamwork, shared achievement, and transparency. It also speeds up work processes by allowing people to work together on tasks in real-time.
Some work tools are great for collaboration and vice versa. For example, giving sales employees the ability to update stock levels using Amazon inventory management software allows them to engage more effectively with consumers as they know what products are available.
4. Employee engagement technology
Technology use in the employee experience arena is not just about how you can enable better workflows. It is also about promoting better engagement with your employees. If implemented effectively, employee engagement technologies can make your communications with employees more efficient, while still showing care and human interest in your workers.
Consider a situation where an employee has witnessed misconduct in the workplace and wishes to make a report. If your system is wholly technological this may alienate the reporter as there is no personal confidence. However, keeping reporting processes completely manual is one of the reasons reported cases take ages to resolve.
The solution? Digital platforms that support personal engagement!
Utilise digital surveys, polls, reporting platforms, and more to collect feedback from your workers and make them feel heard and important in the workplace. Not only does this result in fulfilled workers, but it also develops a regenerative corporate culture that promotes engagement, problem-solving, and transparency.
5. HR software
Human Resources (HR) departments are at the centre of employee experiences as they work with human talent as resources. Helping HR employees to better their work is, thus, at the core of improving employee experience overall.
HR processes benefit and strengthen from the use of human resources software like AI recruitment platforms, surveys, and employee reviews. Engaging with VoIP phone providers alone can transform your HR department, allowing for mobility and flexibility in their communications.
Employees – potential, current, and past – can set up virtual meetings to ask questions, get details on their position, provide updates, and more. This frees up time and makes it possible for reps to work from wherever they are, increasing productivity and contributing to HR responsiveness.
6. Personalised learning systems
Improvements in employee engagement through relevant technologies and HR efficiency lead to a happy workplace for employees. One in which they feel satisfied, considered, and listened to.
These systems also create a culture of reciprocal benefit for you and your employees, beyond the financial reward for their labour. Of course, there are other employee benefits you can offer to boost said productivity and well-being and retain workers, like learning opportunities.
It is essential to empower workers, as their growth and development correlate with the success of your business. While many businesses stop at onboarding training, it is important to provide ongoing developmental opportunities for your workers. Workers value professional growth, and digital techniques like webinars or learning platforms meet this value, bettering your employees’ work experience.
Final thoughts
Taking steps to improve employee experience is not hard. It can be as simple as encouraging employees to take time off. Introducing technology to your employee experience strategy just enables your workers to do more!
With this technology, your business gains:
– More productivity
– A better workplace culture
– More efficiency
– A fantastic reputation for employee treatment, leading to better talent recruitment
– Better customer service
Plus – and this is the point of improving your employee experience – your workers reap:
Reduced workloads
More opportunities for professional development
Personal growth and fulfilment
Work satisfaction
A workplace that puts them first!
Technological changes done well – with the right intentions, motivation, and implementation – can promote an engaged, personal, and efficient employee experience that works for everybody!
Very informative article and much needed especially now when we’re in the times of the Great Resignation. Out of the 6 ways to improve employees’ experience, I especially think the #2 point is much important. Companies are still adapting to the work-from-home setup and for employees, it’s easy to lose focus on the day-to-day work especially when they’re facing the same mundane task every day, it’s hard not to get bogged down by it. Implementing smarter ways to do things like this Robotic Process Automation cuts down a huge chunk of workload especially in the high-volume task industries. Reducing draining tasks means they can allocate their attention to more work that needs human attention, therefore, stimulating their creative side which may give them the dopamine boost they need to be more productive. Here’s a website you can check out to know more about automation. https://wintask.net/