Revitalize Your HR Team: Leveraging Employee Experience Technology

The demands on human resources specialists have never been as high as they are today. As companies adapt to new work realities, priorities have changed and workloads have increased dramatically. HR teams are now responsible for a wider range of well-being processes, for complex hybrid or remote work arrangements and for supporting people-focused business strategies across the organization.

However, while employee satisfaction is rightly becoming increasingly important as companies try to attract and retain the best talent and weather a series of economic shock-waves, the well-being of HR professionals themselves can easily slip under the radar. In a 2022 study in the US and UK, 98 percent of HR managers reported being burned out. 94 percent of respondents said they had felt overwhelmed in the last six months, and 88 percent even said they dreaded work.

Fortunately, automating HR technologies can help here. By streamlining your processes and improving the management of remote or hybrid workforce, HR technology can lighten the load on your teams and help you create an even better work environment for everyone.

How can HR technology help improve employees' work environments and reduce stress?

There are a number of ways employee experience technologies can support a healthier HR workload, especially as most companies adopt a hybrid or even fully remote strategy. Below are some of the key processes and programs that can be at the heart of your digital employee experience transformation.

Planning the workforce

During turbulent times, your plans for your teams are likely to change frequently. Instead of relying on your instincts, HR tools can help you monitor key workforce planning metrics so you can develop a decisive strategy. Metrics such as diversity rates, headcount, internal mobility rate, employee retention, turnover, skills, and time to hire can help you create and maintain an effective workforce planning strategy - and are ideal for automated tracking.

By using a modern tool, you can do continuous rather than seasonal workforce planning and easily monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) in one place. These tools also help you keep everyone involved informed and create agile plans to prepare for different scenarios.

Using automation gives your team more time to focus on adjusting your workforce planning strategy, identifying your company's future workforce needs, and executing.

Change management

For every successful company, change is a constant that must be integrated into the core of the processes. However, this can be one of the most difficult tasks for HR teams as volatile external forces can constantly change things.

HR tech makes it easier for managers to gain insights from their teams through pulse surveys, one-on-one conversations, and anonymous feedback. This information, tracked along with team satisfaction, growth, retention, and performance, can help you prepare your employees for changes big and small, and provides evidence on which to base your actions.

An HRIS is also great for building and managing your change management strategy, organizing training for your managers, and sharing information honestly and transparently with your employees. To be truly prepared for any eventuality, you need a clear view of how your teams are doing and how prepared your leaders are - and that's where HR technology can help.

Recruitment and onboarding

Recruitment and onboarding are two of the most important HR processes, and while it's important to work with human interaction, automation can make a big difference in your workload. By tracking the skills and competencies of your existing team members, you can better align your plans with people to strengthen and expand your teams, and by pursuing a global hiring strategy, you can expand your potential talent pool.

Much of the onboarding process can be automated through a human resources information system (HRIS) in the form of simple workflows, allowing newly hired employees to complete and submit relevant paperwork at their own pace. These workflows also help managers oversee effective onboarding and initial training with task lists that ensure IT, HR, finance and team managers are all aligned.

Salary and performance management

An integrated salary, benefits and HR system is a dream for many HR managers. It saves your team a lot of time entering the same data twice, adding or removing people, editing teams, syncing attendance information, or manually updating salary or bonus data. By bringing all of these complex processes together into one simple system, HR tech can significantly streamline your team's workflows and make it easier for managers to evaluate their employees' performance.

DEI&B programs

Most likely, your diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI&B) programs are fundamentally built around metrics. Evaluating your performance against these metrics requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, but it can be time-consuming to collect and analyze.

A powerful HRIS not only makes this process much easier, but also gives you the opportunity to embed DEI&B into your culture - beyond just crunching numbers. HR tech can help you identify gaps in your current programs and determine the direction your recruiting efforts should take to create a more representative workforce. You can also more easily personalize recognition of your employees' interests and hobbies. By reducing your HR team's administrative tasks, HR tech can help you find ways to make everyone feel heard, included and valued.

Modern HR dashboards, automation and comprehensive data management are the key to a truly efficient HR team. Technology can simplify your processes and boost engagement, helping people connect with their colleagues and giving your HR team a much-needed breather.

As your HR professionals face a radically changed work environment, with hybrid teams, an increased focus on improving the employee experience and the responsibility to keep the company flexible, it is important to offer them as much support as possible.

Luckily, HR technology can streamline many of your core HR practices, reduce workload, help you make data-driven decisions, and provide you with clear, trackable KPIs. For an agile, global workforce - and for HR teams under more pressure than ever - HR technology is here to help you keep up with trends in employee experience.

IceHrm empowers HR to navigate complexity with ease, fostering employee well-being and organizational agility through streamlined HR tech.