To fulfill their roles effectively in the modern technological world, employees need a strong digital foundation from which to operate. The digital employee experience consists of employee interactions with various technologies and applications to carry out daily responsibilities successfully and efficiently. This digital experience will influence every area of the organization, from productivity and savings to employee retention and recruiting. As a result, any decision that organizations make to implement new technology should be carefully considered and weighed based on clear insights and well-identified employee needs.
The employee experience on a technological level is a critical element for achieving and maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage over other organizations. Employees fall on a broad spectrum in terms of range of their digital use, but to some extent every single person within an organization needs a positive digital experience to be satisfied and productive in their role. AppLearn’s Digital Adoption Pulse Report found that only 12% of organizations continue to track the success of digital projects 1-2 years after deployment, bringing to question the long-term tangible impact on employees. Digital adoption platforms such as AppLearn help organizations bridge these gaps, gather new data, and reduce friction all while improving the employee experience along the way.
Factors that Influence and Improve Investment in the Digital Employee Experience
While there are a variety of advantages to investing in the employee experience and modernizing organizational processes, there are a few factors that should be considered when developing new technology or delivering new software.
Measure Employee Sentiment: The central aim when looking to improve the digital employee experience should always be to make your employees work easier or more efficient, and this goal should stay at the center of any decisions made. As a result, choices must be made only after paying attention to employee needs by gathering feedback across the organization. Assess the needs of all employees across roles and levels within the organization who have diverse responsibilities and interactions with organizational processes. This approach helps to ensure that organizations make decisions that truly benefit employees and puts them at the center of future changes.
Gather the Right Data: When building a digital employee experience that best fits employee needs, it helps to collect data and organizational analytics that identify areas of frustration or difficulty, or pinpoint where specific tasks are being done inaccurately. A useful tool to generate valuable, actionable insights on employees’ day-to-day interactions with organizational technology is through a digital adoption platform (DAP) such as AppLearn. DAPs can track interactions with software and offer support as needed all while identifying difficulties in use. This data helps to improve system understanding, establish adoption strategy, and make new technology more intuitive for employee use.
Change Communication: Although a shift to new processes or technology will likely provide an improved experience for employees, it is important to provide education and clear communication on how these changes will affect their work and what steps will be involved. This includes factors such as: how new process training will be carried out, where questions can be directed, and a timeline on deployment. Along with sufficiently preparing employees for change with a strong adoption strategy, organizations should establish a culture of positively embracing transformational change. This can be done by highlighting that these changes will impact employees for the better, and decisions were made based on their specific needs.
Goal Setting: To ensure that new technology will make measurable, substantial changes on specific areas of productivity and efficiency, it must be connected to clear organizational goals. Organizations should know what specific applications and departments they are looking to improve as well as more top-level objectives. Along with establishing quantifiable goals for digital tools, leadership should set goals for employees on expected changes in behaviors and procedures. This helps to assess what is working and what isn’t so that adjustments can be made to further optimize the digital employee experience.
Take the Employee Experience to the Next Level
By placing people at the center of change, organizations will have more satisfied employees and achieve greater results in the long-term. User adoption can be one of the biggest obstacles to the success of new technology deployment, and AppLearn serves to ensure that organizations see a powerful return on investment and a strong digital employee experience. The tools provided include in-app training, a central location for learning materials, surveys, and analytics and dashboards for metrics such as adoption rates. The platform is easily integrated and keeps things simple for employees while still closely monitoring system performance.
Ultimately, the insights generated by digital adoption platforms helps organizations improve the digital employee experience, maintain a sustainable competitive advantage, boost productivity, reduce costs, and make smarter digital investments.
This post was written by Collaborative Solutions, they are an exhibitor on the HRTech247 Workday Partners floor in the Partners Hall here.
