An employee experience platform may appear to be just another trendy jargon, but it is much more. Given that we spend roughly a third of our lives at the job or about 25 years, our 'job experience' should take precedence. Despite this, we tend to focus on raw productivity, KPIs, and profitability. Employees' work experiences are often disregarded because we expect individuals to simply show up and execute their jobs. With millennials accounting for 35% of the workforce, it's no wonder that the conversation has moved and the attention has gone to experiential platforms. So, what exactly is a platform for employee experience?
Describing an employee experience platform:
Let's define the word by breaking it down into two components before going into what constitutes a great employee experience platform and why HR and executives should invest in it. Every company invests in the customer experience. And as organizations increasingly recognize people as their greatest assets, they're investing in the employee experience as well. Let's dig deeper.
What is an Employee experience?
A company-wide campaign to keep employees on track, profitable, healthy, and motivated.
The employee experience encompasses the entire employee journey, from onboarding to offboarding, and every touchpoint in between. It's all-encompassing, addressing all elements of employees' daily lives, from assisting with work to ensuring physical and mental well-being. Experience is a "company-wide project," which means that no single person or department should be responsible for it; everyone has a role to play.
What makes up a Digital Employee Experience Platform?
When we talk about a platform in this context, we're talking about a collection of technologies. It combines a number of tools into a single location.
What is an AgilityPortal employee experience platform now that we have a better knowledge of these two terms?
It all comes down to delivering a user-friendly platform of tools that helps individuals to work more efficiently. On the other hand, we have a larger viewpoint.
An AgilityPortal employee experience platform, in our opinion, is an accessible, consistent, and simple-to-use place that blends engagement, wellbeing, productivity, collaboration, and communication tools. It's made for employees, to satisfy all of their demands, and it goes beyond productivity to provide a slew of other perks.
Why Should you Invest in a Digital Employee Experience Platform?
Employee experience is no longer "nice to have" with employees spending a lot of time at work and a rising understanding of the physical and mental issues it entails.
Prior to the epidemic, HR and leaders began to plan physical work environments that included nap pods, table tennis, gyms, and endless refreshments. These incentives were put in place to make the office a fun place to work. Health and safety regulations have resulted in fewer people working in the office, fewer interactions, and a widespread shift to remote work. People spend their days in virtual workspaces, so it's no wonder that in 2020, 42 percent of HR leaders indicated improving the employee experience was a high priority in influencing technology decisions.
The Advantages of Arrange Digital Workspace for your Employees
Engagement
Only approximately 13% of employees are highly engaged, but they produce 17 percent more, are less likely to leave, make fewer mistakes, promote greater team spirit, and can become excellent brand ambassadors. Engagement stems from a sense of belonging to a firm, which is fostered through interactions, collaboration, and culture. As a result, by bringing individuals together, an employee experience platform can assist enhance employee engagement.
Culture
HR and leaders are concerned about the loss of business culture as a result of the shift to remote employment. Creating a consistent culture when teams are dispersed and employees operate from multiple locations can seem difficult. By offering employees a common virtual workplace, such as an employee experience platform, corporate culture can be formed, preserved, or reconstructed.
Giving folks the necessary tools and resources actually empowers them. The creation of an open platform allows for the dismantling of hierarchical barriers. Employee experience platforms can be utilized to create a better, more inclusive culture in the workplace today.
Retention
Employees who have had excellent job experiences are three times less likely to consider leaving their current position. Given the high cost of recruiting, training, and onboarding new employees, investing in good experiences that inspire employees to stay is a wise decision.
Productivity
When workers have to navigate between programs, seek information, or do repetitive operations that could be automated, productivity suffers. Every day, employees switch between apps about 1,100 times. It's simple to notice how much time is squandered without even recognizing it. An employee experience platform overcomes this challenge by bringing together all of the resources that employees require in one place.
Wellbeing
Employees work for about 40 hours every week. This ignores the fact that employees in nations like France, the United Kingdom, and the United States work up to two hours longer every day while working remotely. Long days at work or at home can be exhausting, and if employees aren't supported, they may experience stress, burnout, and high turnover. An employee experience platform takes a softer approach to employee demands, promoting mental and digital health. Taking a virtual coffee break with coworkers, for example, provides a break from work, social connection, and an opportunity to communicate and discuss.
How can you Create an Employee Experience
How can you design a platform that satisfies the demands of your employees now that we know the benefits of a pleasant employee experience?
Features that are required
Implementing an employee experience platform can be difficult, but it is ultimately intended to make work life easier. Here are a few features you should look for in your platform.
Simple and unified
Employees require a unified platform that allows them to access all of their tools and applications from a single location. Every department uses many apps on a regular basis, with HR having anything from 11 to 22, and no single tool can replace all of them. So, rather than ''doing it all," an EXP is designed to ''gather it all." The goal is to develop more user-friendly technology and to unify technologies to make employees' jobs easier.
Simultaneously, companies want shared places for all departments in order to avoid silos. People are brought together by having a single, visible, accessible, and inclusive location to manage all interactions.
Your EXP should include a communication space, a collaboration tool, and access to each department's own applications. To minimize time hopping between programs, these should be saved in a single platform.
Intelligence collective
The knowledge of everyone in your business is referred to as collective intelligence. Employers are increasingly discovering that their staffs are information powerhouses and underutilized resources. As a result, an employee experience platform should provide a mechanism to collect and share this knowledge.
Knowledge can be collected and shared in a variety of ways and venues. One is the standard company intranet. An intranet is an excellent area to keep reference documents that staff require frequently. For instance, a company's yearly leave policy, office space limits, and health and safety laws. These are documents that can be shared from the top down and do not necessitate daily collaboration.
Each and every touchpoint
Beginning with onboarding, an employee experience platform should simplify and aim to improve every encounter an employee has with a firm. By automating HR procedures, delivering new recruits with the information they need from day one, and creating a collaboration place for newbies to communicate with their team, the right EXP will make employee onboarding easier. With up to 25% of new employees leaving within the first six months, making a good first impression is critical.
The goal of an EXP should be to improve the entire employee trip as well as their day-to-day job. Employees rely on their EXP to handle a lot, from signing on quickly in the morning to searching for information, interacting with colleagues, having an informal chat, consulting an HR document, tracking KPIs, and so much more.
Collaborative and social
Teamwork and collaboration are essential for success, and employees must be able to effortlessly collaborate on group projects. Microsoft Teams is a popular technology that has recently exploded in popularity, and incorporating it within the EXP will help to accelerate adoption. It can be improved even more if your platform includes templates for collaboration, improved governance, and automation to make repeated processes easier.
Social connections, in addition to collaborating on work initiatives, are an important aspect of the employee experience. As more individuals work from home, casual catch-ups are becoming more crucial, and they should be facilitated in your employee platform.
Versatile and All-inclusive
The modern workplace is adaptable, hybrid work is commonplace, and employees are frequently split between home and work. As a result, an EXP should be available by mobile, browser, or app, allowing users to be productive and engaged from any location. The employee experience platform should be accessible to all, from field workers to remote or in-office staff.
The EXP should be simple to use regardless of people's digital proficiency in order to be inclusive and ensure that every employee can take full benefit of the platform.