Sam Button, Head of Growth, Roar Media
Great employee experience is something all great companies strive for, it is clear that a happy and engaged workforce leads to higher productivity as well as attracting talent & retention. A good example of this would be WeWork’s in creating an environment where employees will enjoy their surroundings whilst at work and often share with peers leading to a higher sense of pride in the workplace.
The joy of work is nothing new, implementing strategies which strive to improve employee satisfaction is something which can be achieved with micro improvements throughout. In an almost competitive nature organisations introduce unlimited holidays, remote working, cycle to work benefits, free gym membership, weekly massages etc. Employee benefits is big business with large annual investments rightly allocated to improving workforce satisfaction and experience, it’s now incredibly high on the agenda for innovative companies trying to achieve great things.
Whilst employee benefits & workplace environments are key to the happiness of your workforce the digital workplace is becoming the most prominent place for colleagues to communicate and collaborate. Digital teams rapidly produce and deliver digital services & products on a regular basis, enhancing the customer experience but should also focus on the digital experiences of an organisation’s employees. Given the rise in remote working and the decrease of employee benefits from the office environment, workplace satisfaction has become increasingly focused on internal digital experiences, ease of work and productivity tools.
Identifying Areas for Improvement
Each organisation’s digital workplace is an ocean of connected technology & digital tools, it is necessary to assess the performance of your digital environment and employee’s interaction within this. This evaluation should include analysis provided by end users from various roles and departments as well as business intelligence taken from statistical details of usage per application, diving deep into the analytics of such.
Gaining feedback from your workforce is valuable in building or amending digital services & tailoring them to the needs of the users. However, these internal digital experiences should not just be fit for purpose but provide real value and satisfaction to your employees.
Choosing the Best Technology
Analysis of the digital workplace should identify areas where improvement is needed and create a strong business case for digital transformation & enhancement of areas within the internal ecosystem. The next step is to decide whether to build in house to improve experience or to look into procuring digital applications to strengthen the performance of your digital workplace, sometimes a good blend of the both.
Naturally we are resistant to the unknown, so it is important to maintain consistency throughout the ecosystem. If bespoke services are unattainable there are some great products and add-ons that can enhance experience if rolled out across the enterprise but with people naturally aligned to familiarity, a suite of disparate applications can be undesirable and have a negative effect on usage. Products or a suite of applications from one provider can be very advantages for uptake of new technologies/services added on.
Continuous Improvement
Employee experience should always be improving and involve a constant cycle of improvement through feedback & analysis of usage. The role of the digital workplace is to enhance productivity, connectivity and happiness, this should be at the heart of the design of digital products and selection of new workplace tools. Therefore, continuous evaluation allows for employees to feel that they are part of the transformation & being listened to.
Easy Wins
There are some easy wins in enhancing your employee experience. You should be looking to provide end users with a familiar experience which integrates into existing infrastructure to maintain user satisfaction, increase the adoption of new technologies and minimise on training costs. Remote working has been seen as a major improvement in the lives of many employees, this work flexibility needs to be supported by a secure, cloud-based backup system to ensure end user computers are operating smoothly.
Connectivity and synchronisation can also improve satisfaction being able to sync applications, data and user preferences across multiple devices can provide extra working flexibility. Access everywhere on any device to your intranet can be pivotal in maintaining efficiency & happiness. If updates and downtime of your internal ecosystem can be performed in the background, this allows employees to work with better efficiency & provides the ability to work whenever is suitable for them.
Cloud based security encompassing all access points further eliminates the threat of malware slowing down machines and applications giving employees optimal digital performance of their devices at all times. Allowing your workforce to utilise their time working more effectively.
Digital Workforce Innovation Conference
Internal employee experience will be a key topic for our Online Digital Workforce Innovation Conference on September 10th, Chrome Enterprise will be presenting as part of the event and will discuss the employee benefits of Chrome OS & Chromebooks which are a powerful alternative to traditional thin client offerings.
The event is aimed at CIO’s, CTO’s, CDO’s, Heads of Digital Workplace, Enterprise Architects & Heads of Technology. If you are working within digital strategy, digital workplace & end user computing this event will provide a great platform to learn and share ideas with peers through our online networking.
The initial agenda for the conference has been released today is below. If you would like further details or to register for the event, please head over to www.digitalworkforceinnovation.com
