Employee Experience is becoming an ever more important and measurable metric for organizations looking to boost productivity, employee retention and reduce wasted time.
An Employee Experience Platform (EXP) can provide employees with access to knowledge bases, the ability to self-serve via portals and reduce time through the use of AI driven help desks. The role of the EXP then is to empower and enable your employees whilst removing daily frustrations and encourage strong employee lifecycles as a result.
Here are our top 10 things your employee experience platform must do (and do well) to deliver employee satisfaction.
1. Help Desk
In order to adapt to your employees’ HR needs, your help desk needs to be accessible 24/7 allowing users to find answers to their queries on their own terms. Because some questions may not need human intervention, the utilization of HR chatbots provides a more efficient and less frustrating employee experience.
Another element of an effective help desk is the inclusion of a robust and comprehensive search function. The search function should enable access to data and knowledge in order to provide users with contextual and relevant information. In this case, an integrated chat & case management system will help determine if they need to speak to HR or raise a case.
Using AI powered natural language chatbots, provides effective scalability and flexibility that minimizes unnecessary queries and support tickets. Having these natural language conversations further enhances the employee’s experience on the platform.
2. Personalization and Branding
The trust of your employees is a critical component of their employee lifecycle. One of the ways you can enhance this, is by ensuring your own organization branding is on your HR employee experience platform. This is also a crucial element of effective user experience. A platform that is branded is not only instantly recognizable, but also more intuitive for your employees to use.
The ability to showcase a variety of tailored content to audiences is also a crucial element of the individual employee experience. Content such as search results, news, events and knowledge articles can be tailored to each employee’s persona or permissions.
3. Consumer-Grade Interfaces & Technology
20% of employees cite outdated technology as the reason for leaving a job, so it’s in your organization's best interests to keep up to date with technology changes to maximize employee retention. Unfortunately, traditional HR technology is still lagging behind. According to Bersin by Deloitte, 47% of companies have HR software that is over seven years old, despite the fact that 17% of tasks undertaken at work are expected to be automated by 2020.
66% of employees say that their HR systems do not meet the same standards as the technology they use outside of work. Your employees will naturally be used to using consumer-grade technology and will expect to see this as part of their employer’s systems.
Find out more about Applaud’s HR platform and see how consumer-grade interfaces and technology can enhance employee wellbeing, satisfaction and productivity.
4. Employee Portals
Empowering your team through enhanced employee experiences is critical to their employee journey. An organization that can provide frictionless self-service portals will naturally and easily build employee trust and retainment.
Your platform needs to be able to present them with personalized and relevant content which addresses their needs and interests. This can include resources such as news and events, knowledge, cases and how-to-guides for education and internal processes as well as policies for wider business matters.
5. Self-Service for Managers and Employees
Being able to seamlessly deep link to initiate transactions in other systems including back-end systems, puts efficiency at the forefront of the employee experience platform. Research shows that employees waste time trying to work out where to go to perform a transaction. So, by providing simplified and intuitive navigation from a single experience layer helps them find tasks faster, and then seamlessly initiate transactions. A good EXP can layer critical services within the platform itself so the employee doesn’t even need to leave the EXP. This provides the ultimate in integrated consumer-grade experiences. The EXP then seamlessly works in the background to connect to the various back-end systems.
Discover more about Self-Service employee portals.
6. Multi-Channel Access
Granting access for remote and non-desk workers to all of the same EXP features is key to bring teams together. 34% of employees say that mobile access to HR Systems is a priority to enhance their experience at work. This is why it’s important to have an employee experience platform that has a mobile-first design.
Various factors should go into ensuring that employees have a user-friendly experience on your HR platform. Features such as single sign-on, branding and iOS and Android compatibility can help remote employees feel part of the organization and team despite not working from the same office.
Find out more about Applaud’s mobile-first design.
7. Employee Feedback Channels
Employee feedback is an integral part of providing an enhanced employee experience. Not only do employees feel the need to be heard, but they also expect solutions to the issues they experience. Demoralization occurs when these issues are not addressed, impacting on the employee lifecycle.
Your employee experience platform should be able to capture feedback throughout the employee journey and consolidate that data into actionable improvements both with the organization and content provided to them.
8. A Strong Onboarding Experience
Onboarding is a crucial part of an employee’s lifecycle as it ultimately sets the standard they can expect from your organization. With 22% of workers have left a job during their probation period, it’s clear that onboarding an employee correctly is fundamental to ensuring an employee is engaged, challenged and satisfied with their new position.
Effective onboarding methods include creating a unified onboarding experience and offering enhanced employee training as part of the process. Read our in-depth guide to onboarding and offboarding employees.
If you’re onboarding an existing employee into a new role or transferring them to a new location, you’ll need to ensure that you treat the cross-boarding process the same as any new hire.
9. Integrate with Your Core HR Systems
As mentioned previously, HR technology is lagging behind and many companies still don’t use up-to-date systems. This is why integrating these systems with a consumer-grade Employee Experience Platform can help to bridge the technology and experience gaps for your employees.
You should be able to connect to back-end core HR systems to pull in data for search, or to connect with them to push transactions entered through the employee experience platform. From the perspective of your employees your EXP should feel like it is your core HR systems; making them unaware of the web of complicated systems that lie beneath it.
Find out more about how Applaud can integrate with your existing HR systems.
10. Reduce time spent answering internal queries
80% of help desk queries can be answered by chatbots, this efficiency and reliability of the service can help to empower employees and significantly reduce the time spent by HR teams answering requests or raising support tickets. The average employee spends 2 hours a week on HR tasks, that’s over 50 hours a year! By integrating powerful search, AI driven help desks and chatbots you can drastically reduce this time wasted.
Why You Need an Employee Experience Platform
Marrying together your core HR systems and your employee experience platform is critical to providing a great employee experience. No single source core HR system can provide these HR service delivery features; this is where an employee experience platform bridges those gaps, improves time management and brings all your core systems together in one place.
Want to find out more about what Applaud could do for your business?
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