Employees who receive an enhanced experience are 41% less prone to absenteeism and 17% more productive.
Employee experience, or EX, is a wide term that encompasses everything — from employee engagement to employee happiness. So, how does one ensure that employee experience is constantly enhanced? Well, a good software or tool that can automate a lot of what goes into ensuring a great employee experience might just be the answer to your EX woes. Read on to know how and why.
What is employee experience, or EX?
It refers to nearly all the employee interactions with the company during the former’s journey or tenure there. Employee experience covers the experience of the employees from the time the recruitment starts to the day they finally exit the organization. It is the sum of all employee touchpoints and how each makes the employee feel.
A good employee experience is a mix of various facets of an organization – its culture, its leadership, its processes, its work ethic- to name a few. Positive EX makes sure that the employee feels welcome and valued throughout their tenure, and when faced with the option to leave instead chooses to stay.
What is employee experience software?
Employee experience software is a tool that aims to improve employee experience and employee engagement. It directly helps improve productivity and performance, alongside reducing redundancy and absenteeism with the use of recorded patterns and statistics. Such software also creates a knowledge base for the employees to refer to at any point of time, and is often equipped with a 24×7 grievance redressal platform.
Although the brain behind the tool remains human, repetitions get reduced to a large extent, employees get direct and custom-made answers, and the HR doesn’t need to answer the same query again and again. This tool can also be used to efficiently conduct surveys, without having to follow a door-to-door approach.
The goal of such software is to make the role of an HR more efficient and at the same time, use an innovative approach to continually learn from and improve employee experience.
Why use an EX software?
Maintaining good employee experience is essential to retain good employees who work better. And, adding technology to the mix makes the process easier and increases visibility into every bit of it. Also, with software to help you out it becomes easier to ensure that every employee is heard and the lags between queries are reduced.
Here are some of the benefits that a good EX software brings with it:
Aligns employees to organization’s cultures, values, mission, and vision
Improves employee experience
Helps increase the level of employee engagement
Creates transparent lines of communication within the organization
Improves employee retention rate
Makes the onboarding system better
Fosters a spirit of innovation among employees
Simplifies the entire routine for the HR department
Simply put, a good employee experience software has the potential to hold your organization together and develop a strong commitment among the employees.
What are the features to look for in employee experience software?
A good employee ex software should be intuitive and create value by offering features that are required to streamline and automate processes. It should also be end user-friendly, since investing in software just to find out that none of your employees can use it is sure to be a disaster.
Let’s take a look at some of the features you should look for when choosing EX software for your organization.
Actionable insights
Data is the most important thing any software or tool can make use of, and EX software is no different. Go for software that comes empowered with analytics to ensure optimum utilization of employee answers and inputs.
It is only via analytics that such software can come up with facts and figures, which in turn can help an organization zero in on actionable pointers to improve employee experience.
Protection and security
Good EX software should come equipped with multiple layers of high data security. The database that such software deals with is sensitive and should be dealt with very carefully.
Employees open up about their deepest fears and doubts when responding to EX surveys. Any leakage of such information can cause loss of trust in the organization, and even attrition and retaliation in future.
Simple user interface
The first thing that any software vendor should refrain from is the assumption that everyone is technology-friendly. If using the software becomes more difficult than doing the same task manually, the whole purpose of software and automation is defeated.
When zeroing in on software, check for a user-friendly interface. The user interface should not be such that your employees go through an infinite number of training sessions simply to learn how to use the platform. Also, look for a platform that comes with an ample number of tutorials and a thorough onboarding program. Having someone from the vendor’s team to help you implement the tool is a bonus win!
Multilingual capabilities
While this is not a mandate, it is desirable. Rather, highly desirable.
We work in times when a multicultural and multigenerational workforce is the norm. Having EX software which gives every employee a chance to express their issues in their own language taps into their nostalgia and helps create a bond on a personal level. Also, looking for the translation feature might be a good idea, especially for organizations that have people from different linguistic backgrounds working in the same team.
Conversational platform
One of the biggest reasons software does not get accepted by employees is the usage of machine-like and robotic language and tone of voice. While employees might know they’re speaking to a chatbot, one that sounds like a machine makes it difficult for employees to connect to the tool.
When choosing EX software, go for a platform that is conversational and sounds human. Your employees should feel like they are talking to a person. Otherwise, an impersonal conversation would never really happen. You can even consider giving the tool a human name so everyone feels like they’re just having a chat with a friend.
Work-from-home module
This is a fairly new aspect owing to the recent pandemic. Nevertheless, it is an important one. In fact, if you’re looking for a tool that can handle all kinds of workplace structures, this might be the one top feature to look for.
Having a work-from-home module or survey feature in your EX platform would help connect with remote employees and understand their problems. Such a feature would ensure no employee feels left out or unheard, in turn helping the organization provide quick and effective solutions to employee issues and increase employee engagement.
Helpdesk availability
It is important that your EX software comes with an HR helpdesk. It helps automate workflows and streamlines case management, alongside improving the overall experience of employees, being available 24×7, and ensuring quick employee query resolution.
Integration-friendly
No ecosystem exists in isolation. Organizations use multiple software to get things going — from Slack to Zoom and Microsoft Teams and many more.
Hence, it makes sense to go for EX software that integrates and syncs well with all these other software and platforms, in turn making the overall experience a smoother and better one.
In conclusion, good EX software is one that is easy to use, available 24×7, conversational, and keep data confidential. The main aim is to simplify and automate the routine. However, it’s wise to look for a solution that improves with time and scales along with the organization.
Considering employee experience software, but wondering where to start? Our experts are looking forward to guiding you through the whole process.
