This is the third part of a series about the future of employee experience (EX). For the full picture, get your free copy of Next in EX: Trends shaping employee experience.
The line between employees’ professional and personal lives continues to blur as the diversity of work models evolves into the new reality. Forward-thinking organizations are taking a more holistic approach to support and enable their workers — creating a seamless and inclusive employee experience, no matter how or where people work.
Stats around employee stress and frustration highlight the fact that understanding and accommodating a holistic EX will continue to be a focus for the foreseeable future:
- 87% of professionals are passionate about their current jobs
- 64% frequently feel stressed or frustrated at work
By leveraging technology that helps to keep employees everywhere informed and connected, HR leaders can foster a stronger sense of alignment and belonging, while boosting productivity gains and cost savings.
“It’s time to put human-centered technology at the center of our human-centered experience,” says Miriam Connaughton, Simpplr’s Chief People & Experience Officer.
How to design a holistic employee experience
Related: Next in EX — Unifying employee experience technology
Facilitate a flexible work model
A new way of working — hybrid, deskless, desk-bound — continues to define the employee experience. In a survey of employees who can work remotely, Gallup found that 59% expect or prefer to work in a hybrid environment in 2024. And most HR leaders understand that offering flexible work options leads to a happier, more productive workforce.
The onus falls on organizations to create a seamless work environment for employees no matter where they are, or what Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company, refers to as “institutionalizing hybrid work.”
In part, this requires providing all employees with fast, accurate access to information and resources.
The right EX technology can help ensure that remote and hybrid workers remain happy, connected and more productive.
Tips for designing a productive hybrid work experience
Kathi Enderes, a global analyst at The Josh Bersin Company, outlines actions people leaders can take to institutionalize hybrid work and design a productive hybrid work experience:
- Define your hybrid work strategy: Outline how hybrid work fits into your mission, vision and culture. Address key questions such as how hybrid work will impact your strategic priorities, what critical behaviors employees need to demonstrate, and how you will define new ways of working.
- Create a measurement system: Establish measures to evaluate hybrid work progress. These could include employee productivity, performance, engagement, health and wellbeing, collaboration, workforce diversity, inclusion and belonging, psychological safety and retention. Define success criteria and outcomes for business, people and innovation measures.
- Operate in cross-functional teams: Facilitate design in cross-company collaboration between HR, IT, Facilities and Real Estate, Legal, Finance and Operations. This cross-functional collaboration is integral to designing successful hybrid work solutions.
- Co-design with employees: Involve employees in the design and implementation of hybrid work. Listening to employees to understand their needs, the barriers to success they face, and the solutions they suggest is crucial. This can take many forms such as annual and pulse surveys, open feedback sessions and focus groups.
- Consider the entire hybrid employee experience: Prioritize all dimensions of the hybrid workforce experience, including meaningful work, strong management, positive workplace, health and wellbeing, growth opportunity, trust in the organization, and technology and services.
- Iterate and continuously improve: Adopt agile techniques to evolve practices over time. Experiment, iterate, learn what works and what needs to improve — then measure and expand. This involves reinventing worksites and offices, upskilling managers and leaders in implementing hybrid work, creating fairness, cultivating psychological and physical wellbeing, and re-creating company culture.
Related: How to measure employee productivity
Support and enable anywhere employees, including the frontline
Workers in fields such as healthcare, transportation, manufacturing and retail have often been overlooked when addressing employee engagement and experience. These frontline employees are on the go and might not have access to email or a desktop experience.
These employees are the backbone of their organizations — so keeping them engaged and up-to-date is critical to success.
To design an inclusive employee experience, consider:
- Establishing a digital HQ through a branded mobile experience
- Using artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize and target relevant content and communications
Amplifying company culture by ensuring access to participate in company announcements, contests, surveys and employee communities - Centralizing information and knowledge in one place
- Seamless communication, data access and compliance no matter where they’re located
- Providing a 24/7 AI assistant to quickly address frontline worker needs related to payroll, shift management, benefits and more
Employees are 3x more likely to explore other options if they don’t feel supported.
As EX technology continues to grow more sophisticated, capabilities such as AI assistants will help fill the gaps in supporting and enabling employees’ myriad HR needs.
Imagine an employee who reaches out for benefits enrollment support and the AI assistant, through contextual AI, recognizes that they haven’t accessed open enrollment and there are only a few days left before the period closes. The AI assistant can support the employee with their initial request and guide them through the open enrollment process, reminding them of their current plan, sharing new options, and completing enrollment.
“This is a double win for the employee,” Miriam says. “They get their issue resolved and they complete a task they may have forgotten or nearly missed the deadline for.”
Related: Next in EX — Investing in ‘AI for good’
How Simpplr can help
Simpplr’s AI-powered employee experience platform makes the digital workplace experience accessible to all employees. Our EX platform was designed to support and enable employees regardless of their work model — and ranks highest among the top Intranet Packaged Solutions (IPS) providers in the market in Gartner’s work management and frontline worker use cases.
- Simpplr mobile apps provide full functionality — for example, all employees can engage with content, receive alerts, browse albums, upload images, watch and record streaming videos, answer surveys, give and get recognition, receive must-read content, search the employee directory, and update user profiles.
- Each employee gets a personalized home dashboard within the app, including relevant top-down communication and announcements, must-reads, built-in onboarding workflows, a social feed and intelligent search.
- Simpplr integrates with the most popular productivity apps, such as ServiceNow, and unifies notifications so employees can access tasks, must-reads and critical alerts in the mobile app.
- The AI Assistant provides employees with a single destination to process approvals, retrieve immediate answers to questions, and engage in employee surveys.
- Surveys target and reach the frontline to help improve compliance, assess employee sentiment, and deploy employee engagement surveys.
Get the latest Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Intranet Packaged Solutions (IPS) report
Ready to reimagine the employee experience?
Simpplr’s AI-powered employee experience platform goes beyond just an intranet. It will help you deliver an amazing employee experience and reduce HR helpdesk tickets by giving your employees everything they need to do their best work.
Simpplr is the only platform that unifies employee engagement, enablement and services, leveraging state-of-the-art AI models to deliver a seamless, cohesive and personalized employee experience.
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