14. April 2023
6 Easy Ways to Enhance Employee Experience Through IT
As employees continue to be more globally dispersed than ever before in the era of remote and hybrid work, our age-old method of simply growing our culture in-office doesn’t cut it any longer.
HR and IT professionals alike need to make a conscientious effort to build on their employee experience using fit-for-purpose technology. We need to create a company culture that any employee can simply log in and connect with, from anywhere in the world.
Here’s how to start building excellent employee experience with the technology your employees have at their fingertips.
First, take a look at our guide on how to create a great corporate culture.
1. Build Layered Onboarding
Employee experience begins before day one and long before onboarding begins. Not only should hardware and software be ready to go before employees begin, their application access needs to be too.
To ensure this happens, implement a clear system whereby HR can inform IT of exactly the tech stack they will need access to, with plenty of time to organise it ahead of their first day.
Once this is in place, never assume that every employee knows the exact ins and outs of the tools your organisation uses. For this, provide three layers:
Provide training in their first few days on organisation-wide tools
Build easy-to-follow how-to guides to get them up to speed
Assign one of their team to onboard them on team-specific tools
As you peel back each layer, you can ensure employees go deeper and deeper into their work. This ensures that your onboarding doesn’t overwhelm, because it happens in distinct, understandable and user-friendly phases.
2. Provide Continuous Training Opportunities
Making the most of the tools your organisation uses isn’t just a one-and-done exercise – your employees should stay up to speed on recent product updates. Ideally there should be a ‘tool owner’ for each to communicate these.
Consider providing drop-in training on best practices at least once a year on organisation-wide tools so people are enabled to be as efficient as possible using them.
If you’re not sure where to start, ask employees (anonymously or otherwise) on where technology is holding them back. You can ask specifically about:
What’s preventing them from feeling connected to their colleagues
What’s slowing down their productivity (e.g. is there too much ‘noise’ on one of your messaging apps?)
Which tools they’d like to learn more about to grow in their roles
3. Enable Employees to Use Self-Service
In our latest HR study, we found two pretty illuminating insights. Firstly, HR professionals are spending an average of 3.5 hours a week on employee enquiries alone. However, 84% of employees are waiting longer than a day for a response from HR.
Simply put, what we are doing is not working – HR professionals don’t have enough resources and it’s frustrating employees. So, what is the answer? In our experience, put the power in their hands.
Provide employees with clear information about their remaining annual leave, enable them to download payslips, check benefits, update personal details and more. This will dramatically reduce the amount of requests HR have to deal with and the associated delays for employees.
4. Use Technology to Build Careers
Want to improve employee experience? Plan clear career paths. As Forbes Council Manager Arijana Koskarova said recently, performance management is “the most important process in a company”.
Without it, there is no clear feedback, your employees won’t know what is expected from them, how performance is measured or what they need to achieve in order to move to the next level.
Ultimately, having no standardised performance management is a recipe for disengaged employees and poor employee experience. Performance management software enables you to automatically kickstart review cycles, gather meaningful feedback, standardise how performance is measured and set up bonuses attached to specific goals for bigger, better results for your organisation.
5. Improve Internal Communication
Along with better development opportunities (24%), employees asked about their top priorities for better employee experience in our HR study said better work-life balance (29%) and internal communication (27%). And both of those can be achieved by reassessing how and when your internal communication falters.
While technology can be a brilliant way of connecting for your employees, you should strive to avoid making it a source of stress. Especially if your employees live in different time zones, set clear expectations around scheduling messages or meetings outside of work hours. Similarly, use meeting recording equipment and share important updates on messaging apps or email to ensure people are always able to catch up asynchronously.
6. Use Automation to Simplify Work
Finally, grow employee experience by eliminating delays from your employees’ daily work. For example, integrate your HR system with an open directory platform so that access to systems is automatically and securely provided or revoked whenever an employee onboards or offboards. And for employees, logging in doesn’t mean remembering a password they may not have used in months.
And when it comes to HR, see where you could add automated workflows to accelerate key HR processes such as:
Converting candidate profiles into employee files
Organising everything needed for onboarding
Marking employees absent in calendars and messaging apps
Creating detailed HR reports on key metrics
These are just the start of the wonderful possibilities that technology holds for great employee experience. As Forbes says, employee experience requires HR and IT to be more aligned than ever: “With true collaboration, they can propel the entire workforce forward through digital transformation, ensuring that critical business processes are optimised for data visibility and operational efficiency.”
Looking for an even smarter way to connect your IT and HR processes? Check out our upcoming webinar HR x IT - The Dynamic Duo: How joining forces can create better working environments, improve efficiencies and create happier employees. Click the link to save your seat!
Hannah Popham
Hannah is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Personio. She loves writing about the ever-changing ways that we work and how they intersect with our lives outside work.
