How businesses can benefit by prioritizing the employee experience.

In the span of the past few months, many businesses overhauled their workplace programs, fastening the shift towards remote work, cloud migration and standardization on collaboration platforms. Companies upgraded their content management and communications platforms must faster than they have originally planned.

Traditionally, companies have equated employee experience to offering attactive salary packages, benefits and HR capabilities, it is now much more deep and is now viewed as the relationship between experience and work. One factor that distinguishes the winners in the post-COVID world will be their ability to embrace new talent acquisition and retention practices.

Post-COVID, enterprises are seeing the cumulative impact of many issues that plague the virtual / remote work processes ranging from difficulties in sharing documents, searching for enterprise content to some trivial issues such as getting video conference software to work successfully. These issues have produced worrying signs of burnout and reduced employee engagement in companies. Companies have countered these issues by employing standardized software such as Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and other workforce analytics.

Even at IMSS, we have adopted supporting platforms & technologies, to de-stress the working environment, support remote work experiences in a smoother way and make work more streamlined. For example, with the continuous flow of virtual calls and meetings, it will get cumbersome to move work across collaborative tools / applications between calls to execute a task. We’ve worked hard to integrate collaborative applications with productivity platforms. We worked on making IMSS to be a seamless workplace that lets our employees move beyond merely executing tasks, towards becoming more productive.

We also work with companies to tap into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help do their jobs better, deploy software BOTs that augment people’s capabilities, do their jobs better, faster and thereby enjoy work a little more. For example, we have partnered with UiPath to deploy solutions for city governments in India to take COVID measures exponentially boosting the strained capacity of government departments.

Our own interaction data with our enterprise customers tell us that the daily meetings have become frequent and shorter forcing people to do multitasking through the meetings making them less-focused. Employees have also been working for longer hours without clear separation between home and office, thereby creating an always-on work environment.

Other major challenge is keeping employees engaged, make them feel connected and maintain organizational culture. Companies traditionally relied on in-person events to kick-off initiatives, communicate changes in direction. These companies are now finding it tougher to get buy-in into their strategy. Though companies are able to overcome day-to-day operational work done, they are more worried about innovation. Teams are finding it harder to fully express themselves through video-conferencing and the growth of social and workplace networks has slowed tremendously, if not halted completely.

Enterprises will find their future success based on the employee experience they create today and will define their business going forward. Companies need to take more chances while trying out new and innovative ideas around employee experience – try and create more possibilities now rather than waiting a year or two. They also need to understand that employee experience is not about improving operational efficiency, but about coming together and growing as a company. Companies must shift their focus to building and nurturing that culture to enable productivity and growth over the near and long term, should another crisis emerge.

The future of work is all about employee experience and it is comprised of cultural, technological and physical environments. This is why successful companies see so much investment in new office spaces, health & well-being programs, paternity & maternity leaves, healthy foods, workplace flexibility, remote-work flexibility etc., This is something organizations around the world are realizing and investing in.

• Are you re-thinking your workforce to be a collaboration-first & remote-first workforce ? Such a system will seamlessly work when people are co-located.
• Do you have a knowledge management system that employees want to use rather than have to use it ? The idea is to make knowledge management an integral part of the employee experience.
• Can you reinvent the employee experiences of your customers to pioneer new ways of delivering personalized services and eliminate the in-person model, thereby reducing administrative effort on the employees part ? This includes adding insights and tools for employees to create and manage better experiences for your customers.