Over the past five years, we have seen unprecedented disruption and improvement of a customer’s experience across the whole spectrum of the financial services industry. However, there is one stakeholder that is not reaping all the benefits associated with the hyper-focus around improving the customer experience – employees. The experience we have as an employee working across the spectrum of industries that operate in Canada tends to be degraded and disjointed when compared to that of a customer. Employees struggle to find relevant information or tools that will help them do their jobs better and increase productivity.

The same applies to learning and development. As companies bring employee training in-house, the leading challenge companies face is providing employees a comparable experience that specialized training providers can offer. How is it that I can get approved for a mortgage by my bank or get an auto loan quote for my new car in 30 minutes or less but takes me a week to onboard a new employee? Employees expect the same digital and seamless experience in the workplace as they have as consumers.

At Capco, we are on a journey to bridge the gap in the disparity between customer and employee experience, as in our eyes, they are the same. Enhancing, improving, and digitizing the employee experience is one of our key focus areas. This area has long been neglected, but it matters, especially in a world that is hyper-connected and hurtling towards innovation on all fronts. Capco’s consulting team has been at the forefront of this disruption and delivering large-scale transformative engagements that are customer-focused. 

Why this is important for your financial institution?

Below are a couple of critical insights based on our previous work and the quantifiable industry research on the benefits of digitizing an employee’s experience.  

Introducing a digitized employee experience can increase productivity, the one supply-side metric that economists, world leaders, CEOs, managers and environmentalists agree must continually improve to generate economic growth. Canada is one of the laggards on employee (labor) productivity in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with negative numbers since Q1 2019, and this is a top economic agenda item for the federal government. Organizations must balance tax and regulation responsibilities with delivering an engaging employee onboarding experience. Digitizing and automating repetitive employee activities, providing them access to new technologies and tools reduces frustration, re-work and errors. When a company encourages innovation and collaboration, it results in attracting high performing talent and contributes to improvement in productivity. 

Another area that deserves renewed focus is onboarding and talent management. An employee’s onboarding process is their first impression of the company they will work for and can foster a lasting impression for the full tenure of their job. This first touchpoint is vital in creating a positive experience for an employee through a seamless and digitized journey, rather than dealing with multiple points of contact and requests. Our research from client interviews and questionnaires supports the hypothesis that currently, employees must initiate multiple requests through different systems and with various other employees to get the access, hardware, software, benefits, and payroll they need as part of onboarding.

We are helping our global and regional clients move away from this fragmented and cumbersome onboarding process that can include month-long background checks, document checklists, and inconsistent tracking. Ideally, an employee’s onboarding should be tracked, monitored, and reported back to the hiring manager and the employee through one digitized experience.

Embedding digitization within an organization’s culture can add rocket fuel to an already high-performance culture making it attractive to the talented, technology savvy and hyper-aware individuals entering the workforce. In the next series of blog posts, I will discuss the key business, technology, and people drivers that are needed to enable a digitized employee experience. We will share stories of how we are helping our clients tackle these challenges and what we see unfolding in the next chapter of Employee Digitization.