How to elevate the digital workplace experience?
The not-so-secret ingredient to attracting and retaining employees is a good digital employee experience. But if you think a good digital employee experience can be achieved by implementing some shiny new tools, think again!
To achieve the strong competitive advantage that a satisfying and productive employee experience can provide, organizations have to strike the right balance of technology, organizational structure, and culture.
In attempting to strike this balance, they must adapt a new approach to designing digital tools and services, judiciously choose and apply advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and data analytics, revamp organizational structures to become more multi-disciplinary and cultivate a C-suite that understands the digital experience and is willing to create a culture that allows it to flourish.
That sounds like a lot to take in, doesn’t it?
Here’s where we, or rather a certain new study, come in to offer you some practical solutions on how to strike the right balance between technology and people. The new research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services has identified the four biggest challenges to a good digital employee experience in the areas of design, overload, integration, and leadership. Download the report today to find out how to overcome these barriers to gain a competitive edge in the war for talent.
Barriers to the digital employee experience – a sneak peek
Historically, IT designed a tool and just “threw it over the wall” to employees, with little understanding of what employees needed to do or how, notes Mike Spires, principal tech transformation practice lead at The Hackett Group, an IT consultancy based in Miami, Fla. “As an employee that uses tech tools, I often ask myself, ‘Did the people who built this tool ever use it?’”
Organizations, however, are starting to use design thinking and agile problem-solving to ensure digital tools are relevant, useful, and satisfying. Spires sees IT at some clients incorporating input from both employees and user-experience experts as they develop tools. Kiehner from Capgemini has also observed the same trend. “Most companies are embracing some level of user-centric design, contextual inquiry, and anthropological research,” she notes.
An even better approach to overcoming the design barriers may be when technologists, designers, and users work together directly, which Harvard Business School’s Hill calls co-creation. The results can be striking. Hill cites a case at Cleveland Clinic, the renowned medical center in Ohio city. The clinic’s digital design team gave tablets and data visualization software to nurses, then taught them how to do A/B testing.
“The nurses went wild, doing many experiments to improve the processes they cared about,” she says. “Allowing the nurses to solve their own problems unleashed all this natural energy and enthusiasm. You began to see close collaboration between the nurses and the digital team.”
The overload challenge involves the management of digital tools, services, and data. Over time, many organizations have built up many different tools from various vendors, all having disparate interfaces. When tools have been mandated for certain tasks, employees become frustrated and unproductive because they have to spend so much time switching from one tool to another. Information and data can overwhelm employees if it is disorganized or hard to find.
This barrier is particularly significant in remote and distributed work environments. “Intranets and knowledge management systems can make or break the hybrid employee experience,” notes Kiehner. Intranets serve as a virtual front door, creating the first impression for potential employees, customers, and partners. They are also where new hires start when looking for help. A new employee who can’t locate a particular presentation, for example, might message multiple colleagues for help in locating it, which can cascade into many people spending time searching for the same information. “The amount of swirl that can cause can ripple through the organization and create a huge time vacuum,” she says.
Final thoughts
Employees are key to creating business value. As the battle to hire and retain talent continues, organizations that provide a satisfying employee experience will likely find and keep the best workers. Download the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report today to close the gap between what organizations think they are delivering digitally for their workers to use and what employees actually want in increasingly hybrid work environments.
