Five Ways IT Leaders Can Improve the Hybrid Employee Experience

When you improve employee experience, you get 2.5x more revenues through better employee engagement.

Catchy statistic, eh? Especially after the pandemic, the hybrid work reality has highlighted the need for a stronger work relationship between employee experience and leaders in IT. As companies have to shift their focus from survival to the company’s long-term health, it’s crucial to reimagine and improve your employee experience now.

According to a report by Harvard Business Review and Salesforce, 85% of the companies with high-value employee experience felt well-prepared when the pandemic hit because they were already equipped with the proper technology and remote work systems.

Improve Employee Experience: Five Ways IT Leaders Can Do It

• Collaboration: Unite with Your Team Effectively
• Workflow Automation: Build an Automated Work-Process
• Employee Safety and Wellbeing: Use Technology to Keep Employees Safe
• 360-Degree Assessment
• Online Learning: Train Your Employees

1. Collaboration: Unite with Your Team Effectively

Remote work has become a new reality. Before all the pandemic happened, already 7 million people were working remotely. Now while working remotely, your employees can’t afford to work efficiently without digital collaboration. They have to connect via video calls, file sharing, and chat to collaborate with their team in real-time. Only then they’ll be able to focus on improving customer experience effectively.

Even if your company doesn’t plan to join the remote work club, collaborative work still plays a crucial role in enhancing productivity. Hopefully, hundreds of collaboration tools like Slack, Asana, Nectar, are available to enhance employee engagement. Here are some tools you can use to enhance employee experience:

• File Sharing: Instead of overflowing your employees’ mailbox with files and attachments, you can use file sharing tools. Cloud-based file sharing tools save your time from setup and have great storage facilities. You can simply use Dropbox, Google Drive, or Hightail, Dropcanvas, Minus, etc.
• Project Management: You can implement project management tools to manage projects, increase work-productivity, assign tasks, and automated time tracking. From Asana, Trello, Kanban, to Wrike, Zoho, and Proofhub, you’ll get a wide range of tools for employee experience management.
• Whiteboards and Forums: Remote work means not having your employees under the same roof and jumping back and forth in emails. You can resolve this problem by using whiteboards to help your employees share their ideas and work collaboratively. For example, Microsoft Whiteboard, Draw chat, Miro, Whiteboard Fox are good options to choose from.

2. Workflow Automation: Build an Automated Work-Process

Before explaining the importance of workflow automation, let’s take a glance at some stats.

• Approximately 70% of employees believe that automation will allow them to qualify for high skilled work.
• Almost 57% of employers mentioned automation’s main goal is the increase in employee satisfaction and work productivity.
• According to Salesforce, 81% of IT organizations rely on automation, so they can shift their focus on innovation.

Workflow automation can improve employee experience management by performing regular mundane tasks effectively. Workflow automation saves your employees time by tackling complex tasks that generally require lots of time to complete.

As an IT leader, you can automate repetitive work and coordinate tasks between employees to help your company thrive. Using automation tools, you can design an efficient employee experience throughout the employee journey. For example, you can create a 30-60-90 day plan for your new onboarding employees.

“If I have a process that can be automated, then a person shouldn’t be doing it,” says Ari Meisel, author of The Art of Less Doing

Multiple workflow automation tools like Kissflow, Zapier, ProcessMaker, Flokzu can help you to implement automation. Workflow automation tools improve employee experience management by enhancing work satisfaction, efficiency, productivity, and accuracy.

3. Employee Safety and Wellbeing: Use Technology to Keep Employees Safe

According to a survey by the Global wellness institute, 70-80% of the US companies said that wellness programs increase productivity. The same survey stated that if the work environment is unpleasant, the employees may suffer from health issues.

• 69% of the employees said an unpleasant work environment affects their emotional and mental health.
• 36% of them said it affects their family lives.
• 50% of them said it affects their physical health.

On the other hand, a healthy work environment and employees wellness programs are beneficial for employee experience management. And engaged employees means lower turnover rates.

Especially after witnessing the coronavirus pandemic disaster, every company must think about their employee safety and well-being. According to a BCBS poll, most of the employees’ biggest wellness concern amid the pandemic is mental and emotional health. Employee wellness programs are not anymore, just a feel-good initiative by companies. After pandemic, it’s become one of the crucial reasons for employee experience management.

IT leaders can implement technology to enhance their health and wellness programs. You can use tools like Limeade, Jiff, Cubii, which are great options for tracking employee satisfaction. You can also take employee experience surveys to understand if they are having any health or hygiene problems in your company. SurveySparrow is one such tool that can help you take employee opinion surveys to understand their wellbeing. The main goal of conducting employee wellness surveys is to gather actionable data and feedback to make proper workplace safety decisions.

4. 360-Degree Assessment

As an IT leader, you have an important role to play in employee experience management. You can help the HR team evaluate their performance and provide feedback over their entire employee journey. Constructive feedback will help them to boost productivity and create a better work environment. Also, it’s your duty to ensure your company has proper communication flow. You’ll get multiple employee experience software in the market to keep your team on track to avoid any work mistake.

Before implementing a 360 degree feedback software, make sure they provide features like:

• 360-degree reports: Gather rich insights about your employees with 360 employee review reports. With multiple filters like report pending, self-assessed, evaluation complete, partially evaluated, and report ready, you can track the assessment status.
• Customizable 360 emails and reports: Make sure 360 degree software can personalize the emails and reports. For example, SurveySparrow’s 360 degree feedback software can reflect your brand’s identity by customizing the emails and reports with your brand’s logo, color, fonts, and style.
• Track Assessment: With the help of 360 degree software, your employees can easily use the employee portal. The employee portal is dedicated to each employee to track their performance to ensure they are working productively. As an IT leader, you can check the evaluation status to enhance employee experience management.
• Customizable 360-degree Survey: 360-degree surveys are one of the great ways to measure your employees’ satisfaction. You can take multiple surveys like leadership, teamwork, communication, creativity, and interpersonal skills to understand your employees. Also, the employee net Promoter Score lets you measure employee loyalty accurately. With NPS and various other HR metrics, your company can reduce employee turnover and increase engagement. The best part about NPS is, you don’t have to give answers to long boring surveys. Just one question is enough to understand your employees.

5. Online Learning: Train Your Employees

According to Harvard Business Review, 70% of the employees stated that they don’t have the skills required to do their jobs. While only 12% of employees apply new skills to their jobs, which they learned in learning and development programs. In recent times the majority of the development training in companies is ineffective.

You can ensure strong employee experience management by introducing your employees to online training and development platform. With online training platforms, you can custom development programs according to your employees’ requirements. The employee training software can create, track, assign, and manage employee training courses effectively. From Looop, Tovuti, SkyPrep to LearnUpon LMS, you’ll get multiple options to assign a wide range of training courses.

E-learning or online learning is a cost-effective option to train your large workforce. With e-learning, you don’t have to pay for the trainer, training rooms, catering, employee time, travel, and other materials. The best part is, online learning is available 24/7 for every employee around the globe. Online learning is engaging than traditional training programs. E-training uses games, videos, and different interactive content to teach your employees.

Moreover, today’s millennial employees prefer flexible work-programs that suit their busy lifestyle. Online training that works according to your employees’ lifestyle improves their work values.

So, these are the five ways you can use to enhance employee experience management like a pro!

What Makes Up The Employee Experience?

A lot of people tend to confuse between employee experience vs. employee engagement vs. organizational culture. They can’t identify the differences between these three and why they are extremely important.

So here is a clear definition of employee experience: Employee experience is what your employees encounter, feel, or observe throughout their entire employee journey. That means from recruiting, onboarding to exit, every employee interaction sum up the employee experience. Employee engagement reflects the feelings or attachments an employee has towards their company, which influences their work activities and productivity. On the other hand, organizational culture is a collection of morals, values, and expectations that influences a team’s activity. Here’s an employee experience survey created using SurveySparrow..

To create similar employee engagement and employee experience surveys, you can sign up for free.

Here is another example of enhancing employee experience. In 2018, Apple, surprised their employees with an extended paid holiday so they can take a whole week’s break. Also, they customized their reward based on their job role and location.

Apple managed to keep their employee satisfied because they understood and realized the effort of the entire team. In modern work culture, employees can easily change their job if they don’t get enough value. That’s why a smart employee experience strategy can significantly impact the work culture effectively.

Who Manages Employee Experience?

When we talk about employee experience, the first thing that comes into our mind is the human resource team. We think that HR plays a key part in employee experience management. But the truth is, both human resources and IT leaders improve employee experience in a crucial way. HR team enhances employee engagement via cultural development, and IT leaders empower employees by introducing them to seamless technology.

Here’s a recent example of perfect employee experience: NVIDIA, a graphics processing giant based in Santa Clara house with 3,000 employees, took a major decision to give a better experience to their employees amid the coronavirus crisis. They allowed their workforce to work from their home before the California Governor declared a statewide lockdown. They provided work flexibility to their employees and moved their employees’ yearly performance reviews by nearly six months to put salaries into their employees’ hands sooner. This generous “people first” commitment act helped them send a message that companies should always put their employees first!

Employee experience isn’t about managing only the company work culture or employee benefits. In modern times, employee experience depends on technology. Without the help of tools and software, you can’t provide a positive employee experience.

To give you a better idea: Online survey tools are designed with advanced technologies to save your time and craft engaging surveys in real-time. While conducting surveys, are you going to use online surveys to get faster results or waste time in a traditional phone call or mail-in survey? Similarly, using technologies, tools, hardware, apps, and software, you can give your employees a better experience.

However, to handle employee experience management, you have first to learn what troubles your employees are experiencing. Perhaps your employees are not happy with the technology your company uses, or your company’s high turnover rates are a little concerning for them.

In recent times, you can’t get expected employee engagement with outdated annual revenues, forced survey rankings, and old strategies of running a workforce. Leaders have to gain clear data about employee requirements’ needs and expectations to build an engaging environment. Though implementing new technologies and adopting its features can be time-consuming for your employees. But, sometimes, it’s okay to invest a little time in these technologies to reap the benefits later.

Perks of Employee Experience

1. Reputed Brand Image: Positive employee experience ensure your brand image stays afloat. If your employees have an unpleasant experience with your company, it can damage your reputation. 60% of the customers said that they wouldn’t use a business if it got negative reviews. So if you provide an excellent employee experience, then you can secure a positive place to work with your employees.

2. Work Productivity: During the employee journey, an employee has to interact with the HR team probably thousands of times! From onboarding to requesting a paid leave, your employees have to go through any paperwork. These tasks consume a lot of time or confuse employees. When you implement technology to conduct these processes faster, your employees will get more time to focus on their actual work. Eventually, it will increase productivity and enhance the employee experience.

3. Employee Retention: 69% of the employees who go through an efficient onboarding experience are more likely to stay within an organization. While 87% of engaged employees are less likely to leave their organizations. If your employees are engaged and have an efficient employee experience, they’ll stay with your company for a longer period.

4. Better Customer Service: When you invest money and time in employee experience management, your employees will be happy in their work. And your customer will notice their happiness. Satisfied employees focus more time on your customers and provide them with a great service.

5. Increased Profits: You can increase your organization’s profits by investing in your employees. According to Forbes, HP increased its stock price from $10 to $26 in late 2018. Employee experience has a massive impact on improving business performance for the long-run. So, as an IT leader, you must invest your time and money in your employees.

Wrapping Up..

By taking into account all the ways, IT leaders can work with their employees to improve employee experience.

Just like you pay attention to improving your customers’ experience, you should also map out your employee journey to give them a positive employee experience. It’s up to you and your HR team to make the onboarding, training, promotion, process smooth and enjoyable.

You may think that you will invest your time in employee experience after the pandemic crisis ends. What you don’t understand is that engaged and satisfied employees are the main key to fulfilling your organization’s long-term plans.

So, ensure that your employees have all the right equipment needed to communicate and collaborate with your workforce effectively. And don’t forget to experiment and see how you can implement these strategies to improve your employee experience today!