Organizations across all industries, big or small, are striving to drastically update and digitize their employee’s interaction and experience with the work environment.
For more background on why digitizing the employee experience is important, read my blog: Why is Employee Experience, Talent and Productivity Important?
A successful employee-focused digital initiative requires a concerted and motivated effort along three pillars: business, technology and people. In our view, most digital initiatives miss their desired objectives because companies deliver them as unique ‘one-off’ programs.
The payoffs from successful digital initiatives are compelling and far-reaching in improving an employees’ experience within the organization. Prioritization is one of the keys for success, but there are three additional drivers to consider:
Clearly communicate the importance and objectives
A foundational requirement is to create easily understood and digestible objectives supported with a crisp and transparent communication strategy. Set aside old practices and habits of disclosing and sharing information in a big bang. An iterative, continuous, and high-frequency communication is needed to get faster acceptance from your employees for the digital transformation. Managing the change can not be an afterthought, as it creates anxiety and increases the resistance for change. Digital cultures treat employees as partners and encourage holistic employee-centric communication, change management and readiness to achieve transformative digital objectives.
Simplify before you digitize and automate
In our view, simplification and reduction in the number of touchpoints for all employee-centric processes should always precede digitization. We encourage and advise rapid target process prototyping. Prioritize a couple of key employee experience journeys, map them across the organizational functions, overlay with business rules, and identify technology solutions that, when implemented, will address current state pain points. For example, in a recent client engagement, our process, technology and design teams collaborated in parallel to simplify, re-design, digitize and automate one journey at a time. Encourage your technology team to find existing interfaces, frameworks, and tools that can you can repurpose to manage the costs.
Identify and empower champions
Identify, nominate and empower champions for your next employee digitization initiative. These individuals will carry the flame and create excitement across the business and geographical units and must understand, believe, and promote the objectives the corporation is aiming to achieve. These champions can engage with employees through videos and interactive demos, paving the way forward, addressing concerns and removing roadblocks.
Successful employee digitization includes defining and communicating objectives, prioritizing and simplifying the digitization journey, and establishing champions to be cheerleaders. Digitization of employee experience is an evolutionary process that requires a holistic alignment across the physical and digital presence of an organization. To preserve and expand the re-imagined and digitized experience for your employees, have you evolved the use of your office space, the arrangement of teams, remote working options, and benefits? In the next blog, I will share my thoughts on this holistic alignment and how Capco embraces this ideology, and our learnings.