New Rules for HR: Creating a Digital Employee Experience

People today have many choices about where, how, and when they want to work. Full-time, part-time, work in the office, work from home, take your dog to work, take your baby to work — the options abound. These nuances create a challenge for companies to attract and retain the right talent for their business.

Whatever your core set of work guidelines and policies may be, your ability to deliver that top-notch experience matters to your business. If you want to attract and retain top talent, it’s imperative to create experiences that win the hearts and minds of your employees at every stage of the employee lifecycle.

Creating and delivering a compelling and memorable experience for employees goes hand-in-hand with how effectively your organization leverages technology in the workplace. That technology matters at every phase of the employee lifecycle — not just during recruitment or when someone is selecting their benefits. It starts from the moment someone first interacts with your company until they walk out the door – whether they are retiring or exploring new opportunities.

So…what is employee experience? Similar to customer experience, employee experience improves loyalty and engagement. It impacts the way your brand is viewed by job candidates, how satisfied your employees are day-to-day, and what they say about your company in social media. It impacts whether your employees view their time with your company as a stop in the road or a long-term journey, how they perceive the benefits you offer, and how their family members think about your company too.

A compelling employee experience is digitally-powered
With a highly diverse workforce, it's impossible to create one experience that resonates with every employee. The goal should be to provide many individualized experiences – delivered in the right way, at the right time, and fueled by the expert application of digital technology.

The average person has 60-90 apps on their smartphone and uses up to 10 apps per day – just to make daily activities easier. They use this technology to get the news, listen to music, call a cab, watch a movie, track a workout, grocery shop, order dinner, and make plans with friends (to name a few).

Employees expect a similar consumer-style, technology-enabled, mobile-first experience at work. In fact, 71% of employees want the company they work for to provide the same level of technology as they use in their personal lives. They want to quickly and easily get the information they need whenever they want, wherever they want and however they want – from any device. They want experiences that are tailored to them, delivering individualized information, immediate access and built-in intelligence that helps them make decisions.

While digital interactions are critical to every employee's journey, there is often a need (and expectation) for personal interaction. It’s important to understand that even those personal interactions should be technology-enabled, providing the HR representative with information and tools to deliver a more individualized, human-centric experience – regardless of channel.

Design thinking is key to HR success
For organizations to be successful, they must take an approach that embraces design thinking. In design thinking, teams focus on what defined personas are thinking, doing, feeling, and saying to determine the desired future state — forcing teams to look beyond functionality. It's an approach that's meant to drive design with people at the center.

The ultimate goal is to produce better outcomes by reimagining work through the lens of employee experience. Most importantly, the experience-focused workplace is these three things:

• Connected – with digital platforms that are intuitive, easy to use, and intelligent
• Human-centric – with processes and technologies designed with the employee, manager, and HR professional in mind
• Analytics-driven – to enable data-based decision making, guide strategic decisions, and predict performance

Conduent’s investment in digital transformation
Conduent is making significant investments in several HRS solutions to help our clients be successful in today’s digital landscape. For example, our Life@Work® experience solution, which is the gateway to an employee’s HR and benefits information, is going through a series of platform upgrades to improve core functionality and deliver a better client experience. Our newest release is tailored to meet the needs of today’s employee with intuitive, easy-to-find information — and enhanced search capabilities for those who don’t want to navigate through a website.

Within Life@Work and other HRS platforms, we focus on conveying information in smaller bites for the digital consumer — and we use analytics to improve our understanding of individual behaviors, provide organizations with predictive insights, and tailor future employee interactions.

Click here to learn more about the Conduent Life@Work Portal.