Technology is now an indispensable part of running a business. From accounting software to chatbots, and hot-desking management to remote meetings, the right technology can dramatically accelerate productivity and business growth.
But when it comes to improving the employee experience, what technologies are the most beneficial? In any business, employees are your single most important asset (as well as being one of the biggest expenses). When you consider the cost of finding and onboarding the right people, ensuring that the employee experience is positive is a smart move.
The workplace is changing more than ever in the wake of a global pandemic. That’s why it’s so important to ensure remote teams and the hybrid workplace aren’t a barrier to a great employee experience. Here’s the tech that can dramatically improve the employee experience, boost your staff retention costs, and ensure you keep your team happy and engaged.
Tech and Recruitment
HR teams and small business owners alike are increasingly using technology to improve all aspects of the recruitment process. From using AI to scan applications and reduce the workloads of human hiring teams to implementing pre-employment testing software, the hiring game has never been so reliant on cutting-edge technologies.
One often overlooked tech for improving hiring is social media. Businesses must get information about vacancies to as many people as possible, and social media can be great for expanding the reach of a new vacancy. However, just as there are more effective types of social media advertising for business in 2022, there are also more ways to approach social media for recruiting purposes.
Use the social media platforms relevant to your business and where your dream team members might be spending their time. While platforms like TikTok and Twitter may not be perfectly suited to recruiting in some fields, alternatives like LinkedIn and Facebook could be. Post where potential recruits will be and where they feel comfortable with posted vacancies. Not only will they be more likely to find you, but they will be more comfortable communicating with you, and that’s a good start to the employee experience.
Communication and Collaboration
In these days of remote and hybrid workspaces, ensuring streamlined communication is more important than ever. Collaboration is a priority, but it is made harder when employees are not in the same physical space or when they only spend a short amount of time together every week. Of course, the main problem is that there are now so many communication and collaboration tools available that it can be hard to know where to begin your research.
The key is to stick to the basics. Google Drive allows word docs, spreadsheets, and presentations to be worked on simultaneously by multiple people, wherever they are in the world. Slack makes it easy to touch base with team members as and when needed, and Zoom is a straightforward meeting platform. There are plenty of alternatives to each of these, so do your research and match the technology to your budget.
Never overlook how much it affects the employee experience when they have constant roadblocks to workflows caused by a lack of communication. That leads to frustration, which leads to negativity, which can be hard to overcome.
Human Resources and Software
If your business is large enough to have an HR department, it’s important they are using the best HR software. Any business developing an employee engagement strategy for 2022 should consider how productive and efficient its HR department is. After all, the HR team often has the biggest impact on an employee’s experience — positive or negative.
While factors such as ensuring the hiring process is transparent and onboarding is taken at the right pace are important, so is the technology the HR team uses. That’s where onboarding software comes in. The right HR software for small businesses eliminates hiring blunders, is more accurate, and allows for easier management at every touchpoint in the hiring process.
Not only that, but the use of onboarding software means new hires are immediately introduced to the cutting-edge culture of your business. That’s great for appealing to more experienced staff who know they need to work for an employer who isn’t stuck in traditional ways of working.
Feedback Technology
The best way to find out how you can improve the employee experience is to ask your team members. Communication with your team is essential, and consulting with them about how you can best support them is straightforward enough. But it’s not just the workplace that’s changing in the light of tech advancements and global disruption. Home lives have also been affected and improved by technology. Personal commitments have changed, and employers need to accept that a more flexible approach to work is the new normal.
There are plenty of digital tools available that can make it easier to get relevant insights from your team, both on an individual and a company-wide scale. There are easy-to-use feedback polls or pulse surveys that can be made easy to access via your communications platform of choice. Then there are basics like an internal event calendar that lets team members know when the next employee support group meeting is taking place.
Always take the time to analyze the feedback you get and then act on it. Don’t take negatives as a personal attack; instead, view them as a way to eradicate potential issues in your business. The more you listen and then act, the more you’ll find that your employees are invested in their roles, and that leads to improved engagement. The result is a more positive workplace and a much better employee experience.
Technology and the Employee Experience are Indistinguishable
Technology is such an integral part of the modern workplace experience that it simply can’t be kept separate from the agenda of people management. It’s not always simple to build successful remote and hybrid teams, but technology makes it easier. The right tech, in the right place, and with the right team, can be transformative.
Today’s employees are working in very different ways than they did even a few years ago, and the technology you use needs to reflect those changes. The tech solutions you adopt will affect the employee experience in both direct and indirect ways, so ensure every step of adopting new technology is taken with transparency and input from the teams who will be using it. After all, if you want to improve the employee experience, good communication is just as important as the right tech.
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