Digital employee experience management is key to helping your employees work effectively, connect with colleagues, and enjoy their jobs.
Poor digital employee experience management leads to frustration, slow processes, and increased churn rate.
Despite this, only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their employer’s digital employee experience. This shows a huge disconnect between what employees need and what their employers are providing.
Here are some best practices to help you level up your digital employee experience management efforts.
Establish a baseline
What’s the minimum your employees need to succeed? Is it a laptop? Home office equipment? Tools like a CRM for salespeople or accounting software for finance?
Providing these must-haves as soon as your new employees start streamlines employee onboarding and offers a better experience to your new hires.
Many businesses give employees an office budget, allowing them to customize their setup to suit their needs. This helps them feel more comfortable in their surroundings and more able to do their jobs.
Designing a form where employees can request new equipment means they can easily choose what they want based on their individual needs.
Pay attention to employee feedback
That really great tool you think will change everything? Your employees might hate it.
What you want to provide, and what they need, aren’t always the same thing.
Paying attention through employee surveys or regular chats helps you look for patterns. It means you can spot the challenges people are facing and then find software they might even enjoy using. This is much better than purchasing something you think will work, but that you can’t guarantee will succeed.
Review your policies
If your business didn’t start out as a remote or hybrid employer, you’ll need to review and update your policies as part of your digital employee experience management process.
The rules for remote and hybrid workers are different from those who are office-based. You want to make sure they’re clearly communicated in any employee guides or handbooks and that you aren’t still sharing information from 2005.
Do you still expect employees to work 9-5? What time zone? How will these rules be enforced? What are the consequences of breaking them?
The more clearly you explain things, the better it will be for you and your employees. Clarity is one of the cornerstones of effective digital employee experience management
Prioritize employee experience alongside customer experience
Focusing on providing a great customer experience is a given in any business. But how many value their employee experience just as much?
You want your customers to say great things about you and have a seamless experience. Why should it be any different for your employees?
After all, they’re the ones in your business day in, and day out. They’re the ones keeping things running smoothly for your customers.
If things are difficult for them because they have the wrong setup, they’ll feel more stressed. That will impact their productivity, their quality of work, and how they deal with your customers.
On the flip side, if the tools they use enable them to do their job better, and they’re happy in their roles, they’re going to provide a better customer experience. This will then bring in more return customers and spread more positive word of mouth.
Document processes
Organizing a process starts by writing down as much as possible.
While this can sound like a chore at first, the more you document processes—how to do things, what’s expected of people, where things are—the easier your employees’ jobs will be. Which also makes them more efficient in the short- and long-term.
Thinking strategically is key to other areas of your business, like marketing and sales. Why should digital employee experience management be any different?
Start by making a list of things you might need to document. Ask your employees what they’d like to know, too.
Then, you can assign the guide-writing to the employees best suited to each topic. Make sure they’re reviewed by someone else before publication to ensure they’re clear and easy to understand.
Offer training for new and old tools
Providing training on tools—whether they’re new or old—is key to getting employees to use them. Otherwise, they’ll only use them when they really have to, if at all.
Learning portals where employees can study at their own pace, and refer to information when they need it, is one way to do this.
Training days, particularly on a more complicated tool, can be useful to provide time for focusing on the benefits of the new tool and how to use it.
For some employees, this may be too much time to concentrate on one thing or impact their ability to do their job.
That’s why offering different learning methods is an important part of digital employee experience management (and your new tool’s adoption rate).
Start with your candidate experience
Digital employee experience management doesn’t start once someone joins your organization. It starts when they’re considering applying.
How easy is it for someone to navigate your website? How easy is it for them to understand what you expect of your employees? What about the application process?
The more laborious this is, the more likely you are to lose great candidates. It’s not just the bad candidates who get put off by this clunky process—the great ones do, too. They know their time is precious, so they’d rather spend it applying for roles at businesses that make a better first impression.
Make collaboration easy
Successful collaboration helps businesses be more creative, solve problems faster, and achieve their goals.
When teams work remotely or hybrid you need to find ways to make collaboration as easy as possible.
This includes choosing communication apps that are efficient and user-friendly, conferencing tools that enable effective meetings, and creative tools like whiteboards and mind maps.
These tools allow your employees to visualize what’s happening, provide feedback, and work together on projects.
Conclusion
Digital employee experience management affects how people see your organization. It has a dramatic impact on your employees’ abilities to do their jobs. The wrong equipment can lead to miscommunication, stress, and tasks taking longer than they should.
Providing employees with the right equipment makes them happier and better at their roles.
If you’re looking for ways to make digital employee experience management easier, consolidating tools can make a big difference. Giving employees a one-stop shop for important information, programs, events, and more, means they always know where to find what they need.
Workrowd’s platform reduces admin time and gets everyone on the same page from day one. If you’d like to learn more, drop by our site, or send a note to hello@workrowd.com.
