This is the second part of a series about the future of employee experience (EX). For the full picture, get your free copy of Next in EX: Trends shaping employee experience.
Too many employees have too many tools, creating a sense of digital friction that fractures their attention, causes frustration, and limits productivity. This technology overload holds employees back instead of propelling them forward — this poor employee experience (EX) impacts key organizational outcomes.
Research consistently shows that tech overload causes frustration and limits productivity:
- 70% of employees said it takes an average of 4-7 apps to complete one HR task
- 60% said their HR tools are disjointed, difficult or outdated
- 30% of these employees’ time each week is spent searching for information
Forward-thinking HR leaders are turning to a unified employee experience platform to keep employees engaged, productive and connected.
Unifying employee experience technology to elevate EX
- Using one EX platform to deliver personalized employee support
- Using one EX platform to support peer-to-peer recognition
- Using one EX platform to activate and support managers
- Using one EX platform to nurture a sense of belonging and connectedness
- How Simpplr can help
“It’s crucial not just to join the tech stack conversation but to lead it with intent and innovation. We must advocate for platforms that not only anticipate and meet employee needs but also streamline our technological ecosystem to bolster productivity and overall happiness,” says Carolyn Clark, VP of Corporate Communications and EX Strategy. “Consolidating our tech stack isn’t just an operational upgrade — it’s a strategic move towards creating a more connected, efficient and joyful workplace.
A well-orchestrated tech consolidation strategy helps avoid cost overruns, streamline data management, and even help with talent retention.
That’s because multiple, disconnected tools cause myriad challenges:
- Context switching between apps: The constant distraction of context switching lowers productivity and raises stress levels, making employees less effective overall.
- Disparate systems: The absence of a single source of truth creates confusion and frustration when employees struggle to locate the right information across disjointed systems.
- Communication channels overload: Excess of communication channels makes it tough to hear the signals through the noise.
- Poor user experience: Difficult-to-use interfaces, slow-loading applications and confusing workflows contribute to low adoption and usage.
- Inaccurate information and data quality: Maintaining governance over information served to employees, so it is high quality and current, is a major challenge for most organizations.
- Higher security risk: More employee logins introduce additional complexities and challenges in maintaining robust security measures, increasing the overall security risk for the organization.
Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index
When it comes to EX platforms, it’s about having the right technology that’s specifically designed to support the employee experience.
Watch this webinar to learn more about digital friction and the productivity advantage
Using one EX platform to deliver personalized employee support
In a world where we’ve come to expect a higher standard of online consumer experience, employees get quickly frustrated when their digital workplace experience falls short. This leads to burnout and disengagement — which is a culture and productivity killer.
An AI-powered EX platform can serve employee needs quickly and effectively, at scale. It ensures every employee can seamlessly resolve work-related issues while improving service efficiency.
A comprehensive EX platform with a built-in AI assistant can enable organizations to:
- Deliver immediate, individualized responses to employees and eliminate the need for additional clicks and extensive searching for answers.
- Provide a personalized employee experience by delivering customized and relevant responses that meet specific needs, taking into account the employee’s location, department and other relevant attributes.
- Connect HR, IT, Legal and other systems into a single, digital conversational experience, gathering real-time information to predict and respond to user needs.
- Streamline operations, slash support costs, and boost employee self-service with automated workflows that reduce administrative tasks and high-repeat requests.
- Empower employees with efficiency through a unified entry point integrating bots, knowledge bases, policies and documents across the enterprise, providing seamless access to their information needs.
- Improve employee satisfaction by quickly and accurately predicting user needs during live conversations using historical data analysis and pattern recognition.
“Hyper-personalization is a reality with AI and can also free up human talent for what we do best — collaboration, creative thinking, communication and more,” says Miriam Connaughton, Simpplr’s Chief People & Experience Officer
Using one EX platform to support peer-to-peer recognition
Personal recognition is a top motivator for better performance. “Recognition matters in every direction but there’s a special place for peer-to-peer recognition’s value in strengthening team relationships,” Miriam says. “It’s about acknowledging a person’s inherent value — as a co-worker and as a human being.”
A unified employee experience platform with built-in recognition and rewards capabilities can streamline this process, making it easy for employees to send kudos and celebrate their peers, without logging into another piece of software.
Another benefit to using one EX platform is that it provides access to integrated recognition analytics that, when aggregated with other employee and team analytics surfaced via the platform, empowers people leaders with data-driven insights to better support their employees.
Discover how employee recognition to help overcome talent shortages
Using one EX platform to activate and support managers
Effective people managers are a cornerstone for organizational success, with Gallup estimating that 70% of the variance in team engagement scores is determined by the manager alone — but more research reveals that we’re failing to support them where it matters.
Sources: DDI, Gallup, Qualtrix
An employee experience platform that leverages advanced AI across the entire platform can unlock the magic of managers.
It can surface sentiment and other key employee insights and nudge people leaders to take action to keep their employees engaged, connected and productive. “If you don’t have a way to automate some of the tasks you need your manager to do, it’s time to start looking for the right tool, the right program, or the right campaign to help you to do that. Managers are a force to empower,” Carolyn says.
Using one EX platform to nurture a sense of belonging and connectedness
Forrester research indicates a slight decline in overall employee engagement and predicts organizational investments in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) will drop to 20% this year. A range of factors — including more distributed workforces, diversity of working models and digital friction — have exacerbated the challenge of keeping a significant percentage of the workforce highly engaged and connected.
Employees gain a greater sense of connectedness and belonging when they see themselves reflected in the online employee experience, Miriam says.
A unified employee experience platform can play a pivotal role in increasing employees’ sense of belonging and connectedness. The best EX platforms facilitate:
- Accessibility — leveling the tech playing field for visually and hearing impaired employees, providing them with easy access. They also support multiple languages, increasing employees’ sense of belonging wherever they work.
- Equal representation — offering robust online communities for employees with diverse interests, backgrounds, etc., to connect and collaborate.
- Championing culture — with the ability to be customized to reflect an organization’s unique culture — from sharing diverse employee stories in different formats (like native video) to facilitating real-time, two-way communication that makes all employees feel heard.
“We have to reimagine our EX,” Miriam says. “That means doing a better job of supporting people managers. Creating a more seamless, personalized experience for our employees. Demanding more of our EX technologies to deliver a human-centered experience — especially with regards to secure AI capabilities to do all of the above and more. And it means leveraging EX tech that’s purpose-built to support EX delivery.”
Get strategies for increasing diversity and inclusion in the digital workplace
How Simpplr can help
With purpose-built, platform-wide AI capabilities powering every aspect of the employee experience — from personalization to automated issue resolution — Simpplr One™ provides everything employees need to thrive at work in one place. That includes unifying peer-to-peer recognition and leveraging advanced generative AI to deliver personalized support through virtual assistance.
Employee Rewards & Recognition
Simpplr’s integrated Rewards & Recognition unifies this critical element of EX into the platform, simplifying your employee engagement tools. Employees can easily recognize their peers’ achievements, publicly celebrating efforts large and small via the platform’s feed — strengthening a culture of camaraderie. With customized rewards (coming soon), people leaders can show employees appreciation by rewarding their contributions with gift cards, unique items, or cool company swag.
AI Assistant
Simpplr’s AI Assistant helps resolve employee issues and answer their questions in an instant, providing accurate and personalized employee service to every employee in a conversational interface. AI Assistant understands each employee’s background, is trained against company policies, and can answer questions and solve problems instantly.
Using advanced generative AI, it integrates enterprise systems and provides trusted answers, automates service requests, and ensures compliance and privacy — ultimately boosting employee productivity and reducing support costs.
Employees can enter a question or request, and Simpplr’s AI Assistant combines information from multiple sources to provide relevant, personalized answers securely and complete simple tasks within seconds. For more complex issues, AI Assistant brings an HR team member in, as needed, to ensure any problems it can’t solve get escalated to the right person.
Reimagine EX at your organization
By implementing a unified employee experience platform like Simpplr, you can reduce digital friction, increase productivity, and help employees feel more connected, empowered and engaged.
Simpplr is the only solution to unify employee engagement, enablement and services in one platform.
Request a demo to begin reimagining the experience for employees at your organization.
