The more positively employees experience their work, the better they perform, the longer they stay, and the greater their impact on those around them. That’s why it’s critical for HR strategists to stay ahead of the employee experience (EX) trends redefining the shape of work.
Heavily influenced by artificial intelligence (AI), the four core EX trends our HR experts pinpoint revolve around the imperative to boost productivity, retain talent, and overcome the ongoing challenge of investing in the right EX technology.
Get your free copy of our comprehensive ebook, Next in EX: Trends shaping employee experience, for the full story and keep reading for quick takeaways.
Investing in ‘AI for good’
Trend: Embrace responsible AI to increase productivity and elevate EX
Artificial intelligence is a pivotal player in a strategy that HR analyst Josh Bersin calls “the productivity advantage” — helping your organization move faster so you can reinvent yourself faster than the competition.
Learn how AI has the power to transform EX when harnessed ethically, including:
- Using AI to amp up productivity by streamlining HR processes, personalizing learning and development, and enhancing employee engagement.
- Using AI to target communications by adapting to user preferences over time and fine-tuning their employee experience.
- Using AI to expand people leaders’ impact by nudging them to check in on their teams, surfacing and analyzing employee sentiment data, and giving them recommendations to provide more effective support.
“Ultimately, AI is about improving the productivity of the humans that you have,” says Miriam Connaughton, Simpplr’s Chief People & Experience Officer. “Not only does it offer productivity gains, but it can lead to refocusing people onto other things of value, and be part of how we solve the talent shortage.”
Unifying employee experience technology
Trend: Use a unified EX platform to keep employees engaged, productive and connected
Take a deep dive into how a unified employee experience platform can relieve the burden of technology overload, enhance engagement, increase operational efficiency, save costs and more.
Get a glimpse into the power of AI within a unified EX platform to:
- Deliver personalized employee support by leveraging an AI assistant to give employees quick access to personalized information and important tools.
- Support peer-to-peer recognition with built-in recognition and rewards capabilities to streamline the process, making it easy for employees to send kudos and celebrate their peers — without relying on another piece of software.
- Activate and support managers with greater visibility into what their team members have read, when they’ve been recognized, and how they’re feeling — so they can more easily acknowledge milestones and follow up on any outstanding items.
- Nurture a sense of belonging and connectedness by increasing accessibility, championing culture, facilitating interest-based hubs for employees to connect and more.
“We must advocate for a unified, intelligent platform that simplifies and enriches the work environment,” stresses Carolyn Clark, VP of Corporate Marketing and Employee Experience Strategy at Simpplr. “And we have to articulate the direct impact technology has on productivity and culture.”
Prioritizing EX, no matter where or how employees work
Trend: Leverage the right EX platform to design an inclusive employee experience
Forward-thinking organizations understand that EX is not just about an employee’s work performance, but in supporting them holistically. Understand how the best employee experience platforms can:
- Facilitate a flexible work model by providing all employees — remote, hybrid and in-office — with fast, accurate access to information and resources.
- Support and enable anywhere employees, including the frontline via a Digital Work Hub that’s as functional and elegant on mobile as it is on desktop.
Moving forward, we must create a seamless work environment for employees no matter where they are — part of what Josh Bersin refers to as “institutionalizing hybrid work.”
Enabling employee empowerment and voice
Trend: Use an AI-powered EX platform to activate employees
Gone are the days when we did our annual engagement survey and that was it for eliciting employee feedback. The modern workplace has multiple channels and methods that make it easy for employees to share feedback and employers to gather insights and take action based on what they learn.
Discover how to use an AI-powered EX platform to:
- Activate employees and democratize the employee experience by enabling employees to more easily connect with each other and the organization, find greater purpose in their work, share their ideas, and easily create content to influence target outcomes and enhance culture.
- Optimize feedback and take action by capturing rich feedback through a variety of employee survey types, gauging sentiment through AI-powered passive listening, and recommending actions to increase employee satisfaction.
- Encourage more leadership transparency by facilitating and streamlining leadership communication strategies that build trust.
“We need to make EX something that is a participatory activity for everyone,” Miriam says. “It’s not something that’s ‘done to’ — it’s something we ‘do together.’”
Lean into improving EX
It’s time to lean into improving the experience for employees to start seeing meaningful and measurable outcomes related to engagement, retention and productivity.
Download your free copy of Next in EX: Trends shaping employee experience to begin reimagining the employee experience at your organization — and forge a path forward to leadership in the EX space.
