Employee experience is everything for fast-growing companies. Just as companies invest heavily in the customer experience to deliver the most delightful service possible for their end-users, they must now look at employees through the same lens. If people are your greatest asset, as they should be, then investing in the employee experience is a way to nurture and grow your people—and turn them into loyal fans in return. But that’s not all. A positive employee experience will impact everything from recruitment and retention to productivity and the company’s bottom line. When organizations get employee experience right, they can achieve twice the customer satisfaction and innovation, and generate 25% higher profits, than those that don’t.
Here are three ways HR tech can impact the employee experience.
1. Get out of Google Docs and make everything more streamlined, efficient, and effective
Technology enables HR teams to get out of spreadsheets, optimize their processes, and use a single centralized platform that houses everything HR needs to operate more efficiently. When HR can operate at full speed, that positive momentum trickles down to employees—not only because HR now has more energy to focus on people-centric initiatives, but because it also makes everything around people management more organized and transparent.
Take, for example, performance management. The old way of conducting performance reviews was the opposite of efficient. HR teams had to spend a ton of time and attention sending emails, preparing templates, and nudging managers and employees to fill out their reviews. Information was housed across various spreadsheets, and employees didn’t have access to past reviews or peer feedback. Many HR leaders agree that for performance reviews to be effective, they have to be continuous and ongoing—a performance review every 6 or 12 months will do little to motivate your employees to perform. Yet without modern HR technology, it’s easy to see why performance reviews only happened twice a year—the time and effort to conduct one cycle in the old ways of doing business didn’t allow room for much else.
Today, core HR platforms are designed with user-friendly interfaces to help HR teams easily conduct performance reviews that help employees feel supported, understand their position within the company and their growth opportunities, and access valuable feedback from coworkers.
2. Create personalized, accessible experiences at scale
The best HR tech tools drive the most change while requiring the least investment of time and energy by employees and the HR team. For that reason, the growing trend in HR tech is to provide employees with consumer-grade platforms that are easy to use and engaging. These tools can be really simple—from automated timecard entry to an eye-popping org chart to customizable employee profiles that people can use to get to know their coworkers—but they pack a big punch in elevating the employee experience.
“Employee experience is turning the tech market inside out,” according to HR industry analyst and thought leader Josh Bersin. “Every company is reinventing its employee experience, so they need tools that simplify, automate and digitize everything.” Bersin said companies need tools that “fit together like puzzle pieces and platforms that let them build journeys, back-to-work programs, onboarding and transition programs, and well-being solutions easily. In other words, we need platforms that are not only easy to use but easy to build and customize.”
Easy to build and customizable are key here. If technology is too cumbersome or platforms require too many steps to use, your employees will likely abandon it. But an HR tech platform that integrates with the other platforms that your employees are already using—like Gmail, Slack, or Asana—will create a seamless experience that will provide extra value to your employees.
3. Keep employees connected and supported, wherever they’re working from
In response to the pandemic, companies took a renewed focus on the employee experience. As employees moved to work from home, HR had to rely on technology—collaboration tools, employee surveys, listening tools—to make up for the lack of in-office interactions and socialization. These tech tools proved vital in keeping employees engaged, productive, and supported. The overnight shift to remote work might have springboarded the business need for innovative HR tech, but the current was always flowing in that direction. Ensuring that employees have the right tools to stay connected is crucial to the company’s bottom line. According to Gallup, highly engaged business units outperform the least engaged by 21% in terms of profitability, 20% in terms of productivity, and 10% in terms of customer loyalty.
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Investing in HR technology is investing in your people
Technology plays a huge role in the employee experience, with solutions to help HR teams and managers tackle all areas of the employee journey—from performance management to wellbeing, inclusion, and remote collaboration. Every HR team will have a different way they do onboarding or career management. Rather than provide one standard approach, the technology your HR team deploys needs to simplify the way work gets done, support employees, and be customizable to allow you to manage people the way you want—HR your way.
