Here at Elcom, we've been talking about digital transformation in the workplace for years now. Digital Transformation is no longer a ‘maybe later’ in business – it’s now an absolute necessity for most organisations. In the digital transformation process, digital technology is used to either create or modify important business processes. This implementation of digital technology in a strategic way can utterly transform your workflows, the way you meet customer needs, your efficiency, productivity, and crucially – your employee experience.
Employee experience management is shaped by a number of factors, but in its essence, it relates to what employees feel, encounter and observe over the course of their employment with an organisation. You could think of it as all the aspects that influence how an employee might describe their place of work at a social barbecue. Get your employee experience right, and you’re more likely to attract and retain top talent and get the very best out of your team.
So how can you deliver a great employee experience with the right workplace?
The strategic use of digital technologies can help to shape your employee experience in a diverse range of ways, but here are some of the most essential.
Digital Transformation Makes it Easy to Find and Work With One Another
No employee is an island, and communication and interaction is particularly important in an era where many organisations have a hybrid workforce. If you fail to provide easy and intuitive methods of communication, employees can be overwhelmed by mountains of emails. The employee experience is significantly enhanced if each person can quickly and easily connect with the people and expertise they need.
This can include the use of:
- Detailed employee directories, activity feeds and social profiles
- Project-based digital workspaces for seamless collaboration
- The ability to tag one another in comments and forums within your intranet communication software
- A mobile app to suit the way your teams work and interact
- Streamlined forms and workflows: for example, sending a form to the next person in a workflow once the form has been reviewed or completed.
Digital Transformation Can Help Employees to Understand Important Goals
A focused employee is a motivated employee – in fact, people who strongly agree their manager helps them set performance goals are nearly eight times more likely to be engaged than those whose manager fails to do so. By providing clear and personalised objectives for each employee on an individual and organisation-wide basis, employees can see the road ahead and what they need to achieve each day, week and month to reach milestones.
A personalised dashboard is the ideal place to
drive exceptional employee experience with an intranet. Personalised dashboards allow employees to begin each workday with clear and measurable goals set out.
A personalised dashboard can display and prioritise goals, processes and notifications to provide a clutter-free employee experience.
Successful digital transformation can also support your organisational goals indirectly. For example, a great digital employee experience can lead to a better customer experience, as staff have the motivation and tools to provide better service.
Digital Transformation Supports a Two-way Feedback Culture
The right tailored digital workspace will support continual two-way feedback channels that both enable employees to feel heard, and enable them to build on their performance over time.
There are multiple benefits to this:
- Organisations that provide continuous feedback to employees can see a 12% improvement in performance, according to Gartner research.
- Peer feedback can be even more powerful, supporting a 14% performance improvement.
- Clear feedback helps to allocate resources accurately with minimal waste. As just one example, you might send out a quick survey about wellness in the workplace to gauge internal demand for a proposed mental health program or pre-work yoga initiative.
Digital Transformation Can Improve Onboarding and Upskilling
Onboarding is such an important aspect of recruitment, and yet plenty of organisations are failing to ace the process. Up to a third of new workers will choose to leave within the first 90 days of employment, however Gallup notes that a mere 12% of employees strongly agree that their organisation does a great job of onboarding new employees.
Together with an intuitive intranet and a well-structured learning management system, you can truly support new hires with the contacts, data and technical training they’ll need to thrive.
In addition, an effective learning management system can help your existing workforce to develop their skills in a flexible and self-paced way – even if they’re working remotely.
With Elcom CMS, you can even purchase third-party SCORM training packages and ‘plug’ these into your centralised intranet. Having the opportunity and the means for career development can have profound advantages for both your employee engagement and your employee experience.
A learning management system also enables leaders to keep track of progress of onboarding and upskilling.
Digital Transformation Can Support a Sense of Belonging
A digital workplace that makes it easy to collaborate and share information is one that helps employees to feel as though they’re part of a team, even if they’re not physically in the office.
This can be through:
- The use of social forums and virtual happy hours
- Friendly competition, such as sales team rankings
- Gamification of routine processes
- Using employee intranet software that’s geared for accessibility
- Being part of an innovative organisation that’s future-focused.
Northcott is one of Australia’s largest not-for-profit disability service organisations. One of the key reasons they introduced a new intranet was to better support their Early Childhood Early Intervention (ECEI) team. The ECEI team work in centres away from head office and the intranet's team workspace finally gives them a dedicated area to collaborate. It features relevant policies and procedures, a calendar, key contacts, tools, related resources and a forum to share and request information from each other. Key metrics such as the number of children seen and plans completed, are also prominently displayed on the page to highlight the positive work the team have done and build a strong sense of community and collective achievement.
Digital Transformation Can Help Leaders to Recognise and Reward Employees
Recognition is a powerful way to enhance the employee experience, and 82% of employees say they want to be recognised more for their contributions.
The right employee intranet software will make it simple to congratulate individuals and teams on a job well done, via a leader’s regular video announcements or on the company noticeboard.
This can also go a long way to reinforcing great performance or behaviour, as 92% of employees agree they’re likely to repeat an action when they’re recognised for it.
Digital Transformation Can Encourage Employees to Stick Around in the Long-term
In a 2019 Randstad survey, 92% of C-suite and HR leaders said that they believe technology enhances the attraction, engagement and retention of employees; that’s up from 79% in 2016.
Whether we’re talking about an easier annual leave application process or easing someone’s day-to-day work, successful digital transformation can ease so many of the frustrations that can influence employee retention rates.
Digital Transformation Should be Strategic and People-focused for True Success
Of course, digital transformation isn’t a case of simply adding new software to your existing processes. It should begin with an honest conversation about any weak points in the employee experience, how to prepare your workplace for employee experience changes, which core organisational processes need to be improved and a strategy for creating a digital culture that embraces transformation.
If you’re rethinking your digital strategy or redesigning your intranet, speak with the experienced team at Elcom and see how our end-to-end services can help.
We also have a free, comprehensive guide to help you get started on building a productive and engaged digital workplace.
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