Digital experiences outside of work have made life simpler, easier and more convenient, and today’s talent is demanding the same at work. Cool office perks are no longer enough. Employees want great digital experiences that make work, work better for them.

Improving the employee experience with personalised, predictive and seamless digital technologies has to be at the core of any organisation’s transformation strategy. Throughout an employee’s journey with an organisation they require support from different systems and departments across the enterprise, some moments will be significant and others less so, but making it easy for them to get want they need quickly increases employee satisfaction and unlocks enterprise-wide productivity.

Whether employees are trying to organise lifecycle events such as maternity leave or everyday requests like “who is working remotely today?”, these moments matter at work. Digital workflows remove the friction and inefficiencies of the tasks connected to these various moments so that employees can focus on more strategic, meaningful work.

Take a single platform approach

When employees attempt to resolve issues or log requests related to their jobs, their inquiries can go to many different places at the back end, such as facilities or finance. Often this results in disjointed and inefficient resolution because it’s not always obvious who the owner is or who can rectify the request. Breaking down corporate siloes isn’t easy and can be a technology issue as much as a people and change management issue.

Many legacy systems that organisations are built upon weren’t initially designed with the employee in mind. Some have tried to add solutions on, but what’s required is a single company-wide platform with an employee-first mindset so that everything is in one place.

A single platform approach spans multiple departments of the organisation to deliver a seamless and unified experience for any employee moment, integrating and automating departmental processes into one workflow. Once this in place, a best-practice solution is to the build an employee service centre, which provides a single portal for employees to find user‑specific content, guidance and advice, and submit and track requests when they need help.

Embrace self-service

Providing a self-service portal within your employee service centre is extremely effective too. Having one place employees can go to easily get information or assistance from HR, IT, facilities, etc., takes away the pain of not knowing where to turn and is convenient as employees can find answers how they want to, via browser, mobile, chat or voice.

This way, employees can quickly find what they need or can log their request, meaning the organisation functions more efficiently and employees can get back to doing the jobs they love faster. As well as reducing inquiries that don’t need to be solved by the IT service desk of HR manager, which saves them time too.

Forward-thinking organisations are also investing in native mobile capabilities. These allow employees to access services using their smartphones, including push notifications, camera, swipes, facial recognition and so on for further convenience.

Make work more like real life

After all, why is getting a new laptop or organising maintenance so much harder at work than in our personal lives? Think of something as simple as changing a home address. Historically, processes such as this required you to update separate applications maintained by departments like finance and HR or perhaps it wasn’t even clear how to do so. It needs to be easier than this for employees who want to update this in a single and easy-to-find place that distributes this to all necessary departments.

Onboarding is another great example of how integrating processes into a central system can improve the entire experience. There are many steps to bringing an employee on board. Some relate to HR, others to IT, finance and facilities. If these processes could automatically all get kicked off at the same time, ensuring HR checks are completed, desk allocation happens, and IT equipment is ordered, then onboarding becomes much quicker and less manual.

With ServiceNow, all of these onboarding or HR update processes can be managed in one digital workflow, meaning every new employee is ready to go on day one rather than some departments still scrambling to deliver requirements on the fly. In turn, this reduces the time to productivity for a new employee.

Increase employee satisfaction

A great example of automated onboarding is our customer Asurion, a provider of electronic device insurance that has transformed its onboarding process. Its recruiters used to handle most onboarding tasks, which involved multiple systems, departments and processes to request a computer, get a parking pass etc.

In 2018 the company wanted its employee experience to be as good as its customer experience and went live with new automated processes in just two months. As soon they hire someone and create a new employee record, there are simple checklists for everything that employee needs. 86% of new hires now say that they’re satisfied with the onboarding experience.

With the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics revealing that the UK employment rate is the joint highest on record at 76% the race is on to retain top talent. They need to be able to work from anywhere with companies that have advanced technology to make work simpler, faster, better. Are you ready?