Improving the employee experience is something that many HR professionals have left on the backburner. It’s not that it isn’t a priority; it’s just that it isn’t as much of a priority as other key responsibility areas like recruiting, training, compliance, and so forth. Shifts in the marketplace, however, mean that heads of HR need to prioritize the employee experience or risk losing top talent. A Human Capital Management (HCM) platform is an excellent tool for creating a better employee experience when used properly. This post explains why the employee experience matters, explores some of the benefits of digital HR, and shows how you can use your HCM solution to deliver a better experience to employees.
Why You Should Prioritize the Employee Experience
The employee experience matters more today than ever, with COVID-19 forcing most employers to close or rapidly change work from home policies, and employees’ morale declining as fear increases.
Many employees’ daily lives have been upended while daycare and schools are closed, so employers need to be especially flexible and understanding. Even prior to these uncertain times, a Limeade Employee Care Report found 1 in 3 employees have left a job because they didn’t feel their employer cared about them as a person.
The employee experience, along with competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits, is what allows organizations to retain top talent- even through market changes. More engaged employees are naturally more inclined to stick around, be more productive, and recommend their company to others.
Engagement is an area that, despite getting a lot of attention these past few years, has still been a challenge for many. According to G2 crowd, 66% of HR specialists polled said that they had improved employee engagement over the course of the year. However, only 34% of non-HR employees said that they were more engaged than they were the year prior, meaning there is a huge gap between HR teams efforts and the results.
The employee experience extends beyond just retention as well. In the era of Glassdoor and similar sites, having a strong employer brand is essential for attracting the best talent. When organizations develop a strong employer brand, their overall cost per hire decreases by 43%. By investing time and resources into developing a strong employer brand, companies ultimately save money and build better teams.
Improving the Employee Experience with the Benefits of Digital HR
Organizations on the path to a digital HR transformation or that have already undergone the transition are well-positioned to improve their employee experience. An HCM platform provides a wealth of data and features that can help organizations create a positive experience from the moment someone applies through to the moment they leave your organization. As with any technology, though, just having a centralized HCM solution isn’t enough; it’s a matter of how well you use the tool.
Here’s how your organization can leverage its HCM platform in order to deliver a better digital HR experience.
Keep Things Simple and Consistent
Modern HCM platforms are designed to work less like sophisticated work solutions and more like social media platforms. In other words, they make it easy for employees to come in, do what they need to do, and get out, without overcomplicating the process. By centralizing training, timesheets, pay stubs, and other important tools, you save employees time and stress. You also create a more consistent experience across your organization, which is key to earning employee trust and ensuring that they don’t feel that they are being treated differently from other team members.
An HCM platform can help your organization deliver a simple, more consistent experience, but only if everything works as intended and the solution has been customized to meet your company’s needs. To ensure everything runs smoothly, regularly test integrations to ensure that everything is working properly and be aware of updates to your HCM platform and how they impact your internal workflows.
Encourage Employee Self-Service HR
Employee self-service HR allows team members to handle some basic HR-related tasks on their own. This is important because employees hate having to do is go back and forth between HR and their manager just to perform a simple task like submitting an expense report. Having the ability to help themselves empowers employees, giving them direct access to things that matter to them, such as benefits details, time off requests, and paystubs.
Employees only benefit if they know that this is an option. In other words, employees need to be trained in how to use the tool, and this training needs to extend beyond just the go-live. Making employee self-service HR a part of your company culture will ultimately lead to more engaged employees.
Allow Employees to Choose How (and When) They Work
Employees report having a better company experience when they can choose where they work. By moving HR, finance, and other key systems to the cloud, organizations make it easy to access these solutions from anywhere, creating the infrastructure needed for a remote workforce. Companies that are in the process of adopting or have adopted an HCM platform should evaluate their stance on remote work and consider a more flexible work structure beyond just 2020.
On a side note, an HCM platform also has the added benefit of allowing employees to use their devices of preference, further improving their satisfaction.
Test and Refine Your Onboarding Process
One of the big value ads of an HCM platform is its ability to streamline your onboarding process. This only works, however, if HR updates its internal processes to follow suit. When organizations attempt to replicate their pre-transformation onboarding processes and workflows post go-live, they slow down the time-to-value of their investment. If you are transitioning to an HCM platform, then this is the time you should be evaluating internal onboarding processes to determine what should be kept and what should be either repurposed or thrown out. If your organization has already made the switch, then your HCM platform makes it easier to track results and adjust your processes accordingly. Being able to track the employee experience from the moment they submit a resume to their annual review and beyond gives HR an incredible view of the employee experience, but only if this insight is analyzed and acted upon.
In the end, it’s important to think of an HCM platform not as a tool that just helps HR, but as a solution that benefits the entire organization. Getting employees on board with the new platform and providing them with regular training will help them see the value in this investment. It will also allow you to deliver a better, more consistent employee experience across your organization.
Want to learn more about the benefits of digital HR or how Collaborative Solutions can help your organization make the most of its HCM technology investment? Download the datasheet below.
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