Why An Employee Experience Platform Is Crucial To Business Success

Let’s reflect on the employee lifecycle. We want you to consider that it begins at the candidate level and is completed when the person goes on to join your alumni. This point is the gate to another relationship, though, as the roles evolve into boomerangs, brand advocates, customers, and referral sources over time.

However, evolution hinges on employee experience. An absence of meaningful interaction and shot at development for workers will translate into low perceptions and lost opportunities for an organization. A competitive labor market and shortage of relevant skills forces companies to compete for candidates in the same way they do customers. It’s evident; the stakes are high.

Catering to the new generation of employees means providing consumer-quality tech experiences in the workplace to connect them with the organization and their co-workers. An employee experience platform that facilitates these connections throughout the lifecycle is, therefore, a critical component of business success.

The Blurred Lines Of The Employee Definition

Today, it’s common for organizations to employ a 'Total Workforce Management' strategy. This provides HR and management with the ability to tap into a talent pool consisting of permanent and contingent workers. Qualified candidates are defined by their ability to contribute towards business objectives over their employment status.

Incorporating experience throughout the lifecycle, therefore, means addressing recruitment and sourcing, employees and talent management, contingent and contract workers, and finally, alumni and retirees. Maintaining that current and alumni relationship through technology has become crucial for selecting the candidate best suited to a role or project.

What Is An Employee Experience Platform

The reality today, is that it’s separate pieces of technology. There’s no single solution, and integration becomes the primary facilitator for success. 

If we are to look at workforce needs across the entire lifecycle, an employee experience platform should provide a singular touchpoint for employees to manage their HR needs, work-related tasks, and career development. Using enterprise middleware to amalgamate case, process, and knowledge management from recruitment through to alumni, transforms this into a portal that simplifies interaction with an organization.

Services and support during recruitment, onboarding, employee management, and offboarding, are all moments that contribute to employee experience and should be provided. Each person has critical needs at all times of the day, whether it’s clocking in, support for a laptop, or maintaining certifications, these are examples of processes that need to happen seamlessly for overall satisfaction.

Using a proliferation of technologies to serve processes and cohorts separately creates a fragmented organization. Instead of supporting productivity, it can leave workers feeling overwhelmed. A survey examining daily workplace behaviors, distractions, and tools used found that nearly 60% of employees feel they waste time having to switch between apps for different tasks.

On the other hand, a single platform can help them feel connected to both their work and colleagues. It makes it easier to align with the organization’s mission and benefit from technology designed to facilitate productivity, communication, and development.

What Constitutes Employee Experience?

A report by global industry analyst, Josh Bersin, indicates that “the number one focus for 2020 is to create a productive, meaningful, and supportive employee experience at work.” He went on to add that “this new focus has created a new operating model for HR, an enormous new set of HR tools and technologies, and an urgent need for trust, transparency, and ethics in the workplace.”

When it comes to tech and tools, Bersin also states that software is being built for employees, and not HR. Employees have to find it useful, and it should fit into the flow of work for it to be utilized.

According to a Gartner survey, 56% of employees agree with the statement, “I expect to have the same quality experience at work as I do as a customer.” It’s no longer enough to offer a competitive paycheck, benefits package, and ample paid vacation. Yes, they do matter, but to attract top talent, organizations need to demonstrate a supportive work environment that allows for growth and learning so that employees can find meaning in what they do.

With websites such as Glassdoor, Great Place To Work, Indeed, and Kununu providing platforms for people to discuss work culture and management, its apparent that experiences matter a lot. Organizations that delight in matters beyond the paycheck go on to succeed and attract top talent.

Integrated Technology In The Workplace

Meeting workforce requirements means that organizations are now replacing old HR IT systems with integrated cloud platforms. We are seeing applications such as Taleo, SAP Success Factors, Workday, Oracle HCM, SAP Fieldglass, Beeline, and EnterpriseAlumni being integrated into a single interface to produce a suite of tools that deliver on experience.

With integration eliminating the need for employees to undergo extensive and fragmented ERP system learning, they can reach productivity and feel engaged in a much quicker timeframe.

Automation delivered cross-system on an employee experience platform is further empowering in that workflows reflect workers’ journey from candidate to onboarding, performance management to job transition, offboarding and then alumni participation. The element of data continuity allows for strategic AI, HR, and IT collaboration to build solutions that increase productivity and engagement.

Serving Up Experience Across The Lifecycle

The demand for top talent is increasing. Not only do employees expect to be treated like customers or find a role that fulfills the expectation elsewhere, but they officially make the transition to customers once they become alumni. It’s, therefore, time for enterprises to consider whether they are “a great place to be and a great place to be from?”

Setting the tone for this type of relationship means highlighting the expectation that onboarding will lead to eventual alumni status. Having to opt-out of alumni participation from the moment a professional relationship begins rather than opt-in defines the value you expect to provide as well as the importance of that community.

Of course, the platform that this happens on should intelligently evolve to meet employee needs and integrate services to provide a more complete experience.

To learn more about how EnterpriseAlumni is enabling the world’s organizations to manage and engage their former employees to drive business outcomes, please get in touch.