6 Simple IT Strategies to Elevate Employee Experience

With employees more globally dispersed than ever in the age of remote and hybrid work, our age-old method of simply cultivating our culture in the office is no longer sufficient.

HR and IT professionals must make a conscious effort to improve the employee experience through the use of fit-for-purpose technology. We need to create a company culture that every employee can easily log in and connect with - from anywhere in the world.

Here's how you can create a great employee experience with the technology available to your employees.

1. Multi-stage onboarding

The employee experience begins before day one and long before onboarding. Not only should the hardware and software be ready for use before employees start, but access to the applications must also be ready.

To ensure this, you should put a clear system in place for HR to inform IT of the exact technical equipment the employee needs access to, with enough time to organize this before the first day of work.

Once this is in place, don't assume that every employee has a thorough understanding of the tools your company uses. Provide three levels for this:

• Offer training on company-wide tools in the first few days.
• Create easy-to-follow guides to get them up to speed
• Assign a member of the team to familiarize themselves with the team-specific tools.

By eliminating each shift, you can ensure that employees get deeper and deeper into their work. This ensures that your onboarding is not overwhelming as it occurs in different, understandable and user-friendly phases.

2. Offer ongoing training opportunities

Getting the most out of the tools your company uses isn't a one-time affair - your employees should always be up to date with the latest product updates. Ideally, there should be a “tool owner” for each tool who passes on this information.

Consider providing training on best practices for company-wide tools at least once a year so that employees are able to use them as efficiently as possible.

If you're not sure where to start, survey your employees (anonymously or otherwise) about where technology is hindering them. You can ask specifically:

• What prevents them from feeling connected to their colleagues?
• What is slowing down their productivity (e.g. is there too much "noise" in one of your messaging apps?)
• What tools they would like to learn about to grow in their role

3. Enable your employees to use self-service

In our recent HR study, we discovered two pretty eye-opening findings. First, HR managers spend an average of 3.5 hours per week on employee inquiries alone. However, 84% of employees wait longer than a day for a response from HR.

Simply put, what we're doing isn't working - HR managers don't have enough resources, and that's frustrating employees. So, what is the solution? In our experience, power should be placed in the hands of employees.

Give employees clear information about their remaining annual leave, allow them to download payslips, review benefits, update personal information and more. This will dramatically reduce the number of requests that HR has to process and the associated delays for employees.

4. Using technology to build careers

Do you want to improve your employees' experiences? Plan clear career paths. As Forbes council member Arijana Koskarova recently said, performance management is “the most important process in a company.”

Without it, there is no clear feedback, and your employees don't know what is expected of them, how performance will be measured, or what they need to achieve to move to the next level.

Ultimately, non-standard performance management is a recipe for unhappy employees and a poor employee experience. With performance management software, you can automatically initiate review cycles, collect meaningful feedback, standardize how performance is measured, and set up bonuses for specific goals to achieve bigger and better results for your business.

5. Improve internal communication

In addition to better development opportunities (24%), employees surveyed in our HR study cited better work-life balance (29%) and better internal communication (27%) as top priorities for a better employee experience. And both can be achieved by examining how and when your internal communications stall.

While technology can be a great way to keep your employees connected, you should strive not to let it become a source of stress. Especially if your employees live in different time zones, you should set clear expectations for scheduling messages or meetings outside of work hours. Additionally, use devices to record meetings and share important updates via messaging apps or email to ensure employees are always able to communicate asynchronously.

6. Automation to simplify work

Finally, improve the employee experience by eliminating delays in your employees' daily work. For example, integrate your HR system with an open directory platform so that access to systems is automatically and securely granted or withdrawn when an employee is onboarded or outsourced. And for employees, logging in doesn't mean having to remember a password they may not have used in months.

And in HR, consider where you can introduce automated workflows to speed up key HR processes, such as:

• Converting applicant profiles into employee files
• Organizing everything needed for onboarding
• Mark employees as absent in calendars and messaging apps
• Creation of detailed HR reports on key metrics

This is just the beginning of the wonderful possibilities technology offers for a great employee experience. As Forbes says, the employee experience requires greater alignment between HR and IT than ever before: With true collaboration, they can advance the entire workforce through digital transformation and ensure key business processes are optimized for data visibility and operational efficiency.

In the pursuit of a superior employee experience, IceHrm emphasizes the pivotal role of technology in fostering a global, connected workforce. By implementing multi-stage onboarding, continuous training, self-service empowerment, career-focused technology, enhanced internal communication, and strategic automation, IceHrm ensures a seamless, efficient, and satisfying journey for both employees and HR professionals.