With over half the total workforce comprising millennials in just a few years, companies can’t afford to hold on to an outmoded employee experience strategy. Hardwiring digital components into the employee lifecycle, rewiring interactions at every touch point, and exploring intelligent tech deployments, could help you reimagine digital employee experiences for good.
There’s nothing as valuable for an organization, as its principal resource – it’s employees.
Every worker, no matter how big or small, contributes in one way or the other to the greater cause, via each assignment, task, or project.
How does one ensure that employees are enthused at all times, find the alignment of self-goals with company targets, and are at their productive best? A digital employee experienceOpens a new window blueprint could really help here, ensuring HR teams can leverage the best in technology, enabling deeper engagement, consistent connectivity, and a more ‘human’ relationship.
Here are 6 ways to design a high-performance digital employee experience ecosystem:
Hire the people who see the world, the way you do – and use technology to find them
Remember your clients and customers come from various diverse backgrounds, making it essential for companies to hire individuals spread across multiple ethnicities, ways of thinking, and being. This will bring together various tastes and temperaments, enriching products, perspectives, and services. However, it’s important to ensure that there is a basic intersection of core ideals – values, ethics, work cultures, and levels of energy.
Use technology to locate the most fitting candidates, who resonate all of the above. For instance, platforms like OutMatch leverage predictive analytics to understand a candidate’s ‘culture stance’, right at the time of hiring. This makes sure your employee lifecycle starts off on the right foot, and the stage is set for optimal engagement, a critical element of any employee experience strategy.
Also read: How to Hire for Culture-FitOpens a new window
Make geography work for you – and not the other way around
The modern workforce isn’t limited by locations or sites. Today, most major companies work with a variety of workers, who operate from remote areas, their homes, or even coffee shops – as part of their employee experience strategy. Powered by technology, this helps to spread the ambit wide, gathering the brightest minds, connected and supported by cutting-edge digitization.
Some of your best employees, could be the ones you rarely meet – Brian Kreutz, Director of New Ventures at Forbes Publishing, shares his experience Opens a new window as a highly successful and entirely remote worker:
“Thanks to modern work management software systems such as Workfront (which enabled me to stay aligned with my team), as well as experiential work companies such as Remote Year, I embraced a new version of my role while traveling the world. For a full year, I lived in a new country each month while remaining employed by my company and doing freelance consulting to boot. It was one of the best experiences of my life—one I wouldn’t trade for anything.â€
Let CX inspire smarter EX – making excellence a habit, all the way
It’s important for companies to learn from their customer experience initiatives, the essentials of behavior mapping, sentiment analysis, UX models, data-focused performance management – and re-apply the same to employee engagement campaigns. This is an integral part of any employee experience strategy, reinforcing a company’s brand identity, both inside and outside, reaffirming partnerships with both external and internal stakeholders.
Also read: Here’s how you build a successful Employee Self-Service (ESS) programOpens a new window
Improve onboarding – making it smart, fast, and meaningful
The first impression is always a major driver, for thought and motivation, and unquestionably pivotal for any digital employee experience. Create a high-quality, personalized, and informative onboarding program for your new employees, making the process comfortable, involving, and easy-to-follow. Technology can hugely help in the regard, removing outmoded legacy approaches and transforming onboarding as a whole, as part of your employee experience strategy.
“We all hate bureaucracy and filling out forms and nothing is more frustrating than when we have to continually input the same information over and over, because there is the right-hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. We hate it when we’re dealing with a bank or credit card company or insurance company.  So imagine how that toxic that feeling can be – the sense that no one is listening or knows you – when it’s your first week on the new job,†said Harel Tayeb, CEO at KryonOpens a new window in conversation with HR Technologist. Kryon uses robotic process automation to mitigate the drudgery of paperwork and red tape, streamlining employee experiences, even as they step into your organization.
Enable an employee experience strategy that’s tailored perfectly – changing shape and form as per requirement
It’s vital to keep in mind that different sets of employees – HQ top executives, new & junior recruits, factory workers, and interns – will need various, alternative engagement models, each crafted to perfection. Therefore, use technology to architect an employee experience strategy that is fine-tuned to location or division or level-based necessities, and is all-embracing and sensitive.
“I envision personalization to become more than just an afterthought. I see it becoming the new norm in the workplace. There is no “one size fits all†approach when it comes to workplace productivity, and allowing employees to choose the software, processes, and devices that work for their unique needs is crucial in fostering a high-performing culture,†explains Sean Nolan, CEO at Blink, speaking on the need for a robust digital employee experience plan. Read more about his recommendations on building a personalized digital workplace, hereOpens a new window .
Listen to what the data is saying – and add nuance and texture to experience management
Data is everywhere, flowing from several channels – from personal to professional – helping companies make more informed decisions. It’s critical to gather all this data, and refine plans, adding insights, context, and individualization for an enriched and perfectly calibrated engagement matrix. This will refresh a company’s employee experience strategy, removing what’s amiss, and rewarding what’s successful.
These are some of the most common way to refine one’s digital employee experience methodology, enabling actual value-creation and the sustained building of genuine relationships. Equipped with a plan in place and powered by technology such experiential plans could become a differentiator for productivity and business performance.