As the pandemic continues to change the workplace, your organization’s performance increasingly depends on your employee experience.
Building and maintaining a powerful employee experience that fosters collaboration, creativity, productivity, and engagement is crucial to driving your growth. It can help you ensure your employees meet their potential without unexpected hiccups and stay committed to your growth.
Tapping the full power of your organization’s people depends on applying the right employee experience technology (EX).
Yet fewer than a third (31%) of executives responding to a recent survey said employee experience is a high priority at their organizations.
And not all businesses that do prioritize employee experience view it as a technological concern. Far more respondents said their organizations view employee experience as the responsibility of human resources (40%) or the C-suite (14%) than IT (fewer than 5%).
But a majority of executives in the survey said EX initiatives have had the greatest impact on engagement and productivity. And many of these executives see the promise in EX improvements: 62% hope to boost productivity; 51%, employee retention; and 47%, collaboration.
Today, that difference is critical. Most respondents (93%) who said their companies prioritize employee experience felt their organizations are well-positioned to work remotely with efficiency. And a similar majority (94%) of those who prioritize employee experience consider their remote-work agility a competitive advantage.
Empowering Your Remote Workforce
In a remote work environment, getting that advantage depends on technological considerations: making sure employees have streamlined login and password protocols, high bandwidth, low latency, and compatibility across systems and formats.
“Think about IT as the pipeline that enables a good experience,” says Jeff Spar, former CIO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Reader’s Digest. “It’s an enabling component of a good workplace experience. If it isn’t working well, everyone is frustrated.”
EX often boils down to the basics. Can employees access the business applications they need—even their email? Cloud-based applications give employees the seamless, secure access they need to achieve high efficiency and productivity from remote offices.
A Healthy Online Culture
Employee engagement takes more than productivity tools. It requires a robust corporate culture, too. And technology enables culture as much as work productivity.
Online resource groups and internal social applications, long vital to remote employees who couldn’t benefit from in-person inspiration and information-sharing, now serve entire organizations equally. In this work environment, the connectivity that technology allows is critical to employee engagement, well-being, belonging, retention, and company performance.
Organizations that prioritize employee experience see a greater boost to profitability, resilience, and growth than those that don’t, the survey revealed.
“Finding time for employees to come together is more important than ever,” says Rosanna Durruthy, LinkedIn’s VP of Global Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “Harnessing the power of employee [online] resource groups is one way, we’ve found, to maintain connective tissue across global, distributed, and remote teams.”
Getting Started
For some complex organizations, adopting an EX-centered approach to culture can pose challenges. Fulfilling the promise of EX requires executives’ and management’s full support to motivate employees through the changes, making sure individuals get customized EX—and clearing any red tape.
One starting point is to define the parameters: where employee experience stops and human-resources management begins. Effective employee experience policy and practices can boost management, but they’re not a substitute for it. The key is balancing organizational structure with employee autonomy, says Mike Stull, chief strategy officer of Employers Health.
Now more than ever, a company’s success depends on having a robust employee experience. And organizations implementing cultural changes that enable support powerful EX, particularly in a remote work environment, are seeing ways their investments may make them more productive, resilient, and competitive.
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