HR technology and employee experience: Setting the tone for 2023 and beyond

Post pandemic, employees are looking for an experience of work that delivers a legitimate sense of increased agency on what’s gone before.

This is the tangible opportunity for individuals to have more influence on the terms and conditions of their employment, a greater say in the work they are doing and a more purpose-driven connection to it.

Companies are being encouraged to recognize that trust-based cultures provide competitive advantage, and employees are making their preferences clear when it comes to their need for flexibility.

The elements that constitute a company’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP) have extended far beyond the easy-to-quantify for a while already (that is to say, far beyond salary + benefits in monetary terms).

HR practitioners strategizing for core business outcomes, like productivity and retention, consider employee experience a fundamental component of EVP in 2023 and beyond.

However, the same HR practitioners in many organizations now find themselves in a position where the constantly debated power dynamic in the employee employer relationship has made a seismic shift.

On one side of this arrangement businesses are taking dramatic action to cut costs. On the other side are the employees being impacted by this cost cutting (both those laid off, and those retained in the culture that remains.)

Some HR professionals would likely argue that in the current climate their jobs are being made harder by commercially driven and sometimes unilateral decision-making, resulting in headcount reduction that doesn’t tend to produce better overall company performance anyway.

Thousands have been seemingly quite suddenly laid off, and thrown into a difficult job market in the midst of rising costs of living.

This is happening widely in some industries, despite the suggestion that individuals impacted could need to allow themselves up to two years to recover from the trauma of losing their job.

Companies, their decision-making and how they continue to handle this period of change, is not going unnoticed.

Employee experience is truly under the spotlight. And for HR practitioners, this is not a straightforward environment in which to be designing employee experience.

The role of HR technology

If HR departments are unsure where to turn to have immediate positive impact and don’t currently have a data strategy, plan for their use of HR technology or an embedded digital mindset, these are all areas that can be quickly addressed.

Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter and observe over the course of their tenure at an organization.

On the basis of this definition, it’s a cumulative, collective experience that is influenced at all stages of the employee lifecycle, and has the potential to be influenced by quite literally anything and everything that goes on within an organization.

In the course of their daily jobs, employees encounter lots of information – to differing degrees of sophistication – that is being collected, stored and distributed across a whole host of different platforms, and communicated across multiple mechanisms.

Ideally, these platforms and mechanisms should form a collective set of interfaces aimed to streamline and enhance everyone’s experience of work.

It’s certainly the case that access to high quality technology, and a cohesive tech experience plays an important role in meeting high standards of employee experience.

There is a risk in deploying any HR technology into a company’s tech stack, that some important steps of human-centered design get missed along the way.

Keeping employee experience in mind, this is particularly the case for technology designed to measure business level outcomes, for example productivity.

Companies that might be grappling culturally with the shift to hybrid working for example, could choose to replace physical in-office presence with employee time monitoring technology.

Sometimes referred to as ‘bossware’, this is technology that prompts Orwellian references, breaks employee trust and creates a culture of fear (with due cause, given that companies have confirmed terminating workers after implementing employee monitoring software).

Closing the gap between engagement and experience

HR technology needs to concern itself first and foremost with demonstrating credibility where designing for employee experience is concerned.

A great example is the most commonplace instance of digitized employee experience in the workplace; the engagement survey.

Employee engagement is often used as the primary indicator of the strength and quality of the employee experience a company provides.

The practice of using engagement surveys has been established for years, and there is a question that HR practitioners have been posing in engagement surveys for just as long; something that reads along the lines of ‘how strongly do you believe the company will take action in response to this survey?’

There is good reason to place a bet that this question will generate one of any engagement survey’s lowest scores. That’s because, “58% of companies (a majority) are not taking meaningful action on the data from their employee engagement surveys”.

Companies need to close the gap between the HR insight they receive and the employee experience they deliver in response.

Collecting higher scores in response to the engagement survey’s ‘belief in action’ question, means dramatically improving the HR analytics game in all organizations, and doing so with confidence and transparency for employees.

Companies need to be ready to inform their employees about the information they are collecting, for what reason and what they plan to use that data for.

To effectively influence employee experience today, and in preparation for the future of work, HR needs to be ready with insight, and ready to answer questions like:

• How is your company-wide tech stack, including the HR technology you embed, directly helping your employees?
• Have you built and are you maintaining the people dashboard that your line managers need?
• As you’re introducing technology, how are you training and enabling employees to get the biggest benefit from it?

If a company wants to improve business-level, people-related outcomes, and it has a choice between for example, the HR department deploying employee monitoring software to track employee activity, or investing in better systems and upskilling for collecting, segmenting and analyzing people information in-house, the decision in 2023 should be obvious.

Learn how employee experience technology is evolving in 2023 – book your free place on our upcoming webinar today.