Elevating your digital workplace strategy is one of the most important things you can be thinking about for the coming year because let’s face it, crafting an effective employee experience is no easy task – there’s a lot you need to consider if you want to get it right.
For companies new to the journey of designing an employee experience, that likely means understanding the trends and getting a handle on all the confusing terminology in the industry, while organizations farther along in their experience initiatives are probably digging into the nitty-gritty of specifics like best practices for implementing a chatbot.
Regardless of where your company is at, however, one thing is certain – technology will play an important role in your experience transformation, and that’s where the importance of outcome-driven design comes in.
Regardless of what type of employee experience technology (ExTech) you’re considering – an upgraded intranet, a digital employee experience platform, etc., it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on the specific features a solution has and thinking that more = better, even if the features are utterly useless (like intelligent toilets that can take your blood pressure or Alexa-enabled salt shakers).
t’s time to ditch that outmoded way of thinking and embrace the fact that features are only valuable or necessary if they solve a problem.
If the end goal is to simplify the work day for employees, businesses should focus on implementing ExTech that creates value by helping staff achieve their outcomes more efficiently.
Take this example for instance:
An employee wants to schedule a vacation but needs to know how much time off they have available. It’s a simple task performed routinely by employees, but in most organizations getting an answer would mean logging into a complex HR system and spending several minutes poking around and digging several layers deep (and that doesn’t even factor in the time it would take to find the login information for the HR system since it’s probably not used all that frequently).
But what if it could be simpler than that? What if instead of having to hunt for the answer, employees knew exactly where to go to get the information and with just a few clicks they could initiate all the tasks necessary to schedule a vacation, like requesting time off from an HR system, blocking the time on a calendar system and also setting up an out of office auto-reply -- all without having to log in to the core systems?
A modern digital employee experience means using outcome-driven design to complete routine tasks in fewer steps.
That scenario isn’t a fairy tale, it’s outcome-driven design – the process of creating value by simplifying common tasks so that employees have the time and the freedom to focus on more high-value work.
To provide an employee experience that truly delivers bottom line results and helps attract and retain top talent, organizations can’t lose sight of what employees want to achieve. Josh Bersin suggests that to find out what those employee goals are, employers should “empathize with … employees, follow them around, survey and interview them, and sit down with them in workshops. They will tell you what bugs them at work, and you’ll hear all sorts of little things that make work difficult.”
The time has come to start thinking beyond features and finding ExTech that eliminates the heavy lifting of routine tasks from employees. Abstracting information and institutional knowledge out of complex systems and enabling employees to achieve common tasks more quickly and easily is an approach that will go a long way in helping evolve your digital workplace.
To learn more about how to simplify your employee experience such as how to:
Consolidate notifications, approvals, tasks and messaging into a single, modern interface
Provide instant answers to frequent inquiries, and helps automate tasks
Engage employees with the modern consumer-like experiences they expect, anytime, anywhere, any device
Learn more about the Workgrid Digital Assistant today!
