Enhancing Employee Experience Across the Lifecycle with HR Tech
In the world of technology, user experience (UX) is a hot topic - if people don’t like the software, they won’t use it. Clearly, a great UX is fundamental for gaining and retaining customers, but how do we harness this to build a happier, more productive workforce?
Enter HR self-service, the game-changer of the modern workplace empowering employees to complete a myriad of HR processes with minimal effort, whilst removing significant onus from the HR team.
Not only do self-service tools help to keep employees engaged and motivated but they’re also paramount to improving productivity. Though how does this fit in with the wider employee experience to ensure happy staff and organisational success in the long-term?
We examine 5 critical stages of the employee lifecycle and the role of HR technology in supporting your strategies to facilitate a world-class employee experience.
STAGE #1: Recruiting
Goals:
- Make it simple for candidates to discover and apply for open vacancies
- Deliver a customised and highly branded experience through an easy-to-navigate platform
Strategies: Similar to the sales cycle, your job is to funnel quality leads through the recruitment process with the goal of turning them into employees. This means having a clear and concise message to publish on an accessible and interesting platform. From there, make your application as short as possible - one great way to quantify this is to measure in clicks. How many times does the applicant have to change pages, fill out fields and move on to the ‘next’ form before you have enough information? Figure out what is most meaningful to you and prioritise.
STAGE #2: Onboarding
Goals:
- Quickly move a new starter from ‘offer accepted’ to day one in the job
- Provide a seamless and informative onboarding experience
Strategies: This step may be small in terms of number of days or touchpoints, but it is a huge opportunity for you to engage with new starters so that they can get a real feel for your workplace culture. Employee onboarding usually includes a lot of paperwork, signatures, and generally the ‘boring’ stuff. How many parts of your onboarding process can you automate to get their induction checklist quickly ticked off? To keep engagement levels high, you may consider visual information feeds via your onboarding portal to avoid a communication and activity black hole.
STAGE #3: Training
Goals:
- Upskill employees to support their professional development
- Bolster motivation and productivity
Strategies: Training and development are essential to the employee experience to ensure staff feel valued and are equipped with the right skills to perform their jobs. Whether you want to offer a whole host of eLearning courses, training guides or provide mentors so that employees have someone they can reach out to for support, creating progression opportunities will help to keep your staff motivated and loyal to your organisation. Plus, with mobile self-service, staff can conveniently gain access to and complete online training at any time and from any location.
STAGE #4: Maintenance
Goals:
- Empower employees to keep documents and personal information up-to-date
- Enable your entire workforce to remain complaint
Strategies: The world of benefits, compliance, workplace policies and other employee documentation is nearly impossible for HR to keep up with alone, even for those who deal with them regularly. To the average employee, it can also be confusing and takes time away from their day-to-day role. Human resources document management technology can provide fantastic self-service opportunities so your colleagues can easily review, update, or print off their information of their own accord, with helpful notifications and reminders to give them a nudge.
STAGE #5: Performance reviews and recognition
Goals:
- Retain and grow your top talent for the long-term
- Align employee development to your organisational values
Strategies: So, you now have a happy, productive, and engaged employee, but how do you keep the conversation going and make sure they stay that way? The key is communication. Ensure your employees have a way to connect easily and often, whilst facilitating the means for staff to celebrate one another’s successes. Communication between teams, departments, and superiors is vital to retention and should include objective setting through performance management software as well as utilising social recognition tools to acknowledge a job well done and improve overall employee satisfaction.
As you can see, employee experience matters at every stage of the employee lifecycle and getting it right needn’t be a mammoth task with the support of self-service HR software. Though if you want to be sure you’re hitting the mark throughout this journey, simply ask your people for their valued feedback, which is yet another proven way to enhance this rapidly growing focus area for HR.
Are you ready to reinvigorate the employee experience in your organisation and want to learn more about how technology can help? Download new HR guide.
