In the past two and a half years, we have seen that remote work is a core part of any organization’s employee experience. IT teams worked to quickly give employees the tools they needed to collaborate and meet deadlines, while ensuring that remote work did not increase security risks.
It didn’t do it in a silo. HR and IT worked together to force organizational change. It might be the hardest part as teams return to hybrid or fully remote workplace.
Changing our collective muscle memories may be difficult, as the practices adopted during the Pandemic became industry standard. For younger workers who have spent their entire careers at home, remote work is the only way. Senior employees have become accustomed to the new lifestyle and may not return to the office.
There are ways to strengthen teams and boost productivity.
One of the most pressing challenges IT can solve is defining the employee experience and making it universal. Pre-pandemic, the needs of remote workers were ignored. The reliance on shared tools fostered equity and a connection that could be challenged with a hybrid workforce.
IT needs to bring the in-office experience up to par with working from home if companies want employees to return to the office. The science of creating systems and infrastructure to support these relationships and the art of ensuring employees are using them are involved in this.
1. Partner with HR to personalize onboarding
Ensuring that employees feel supported by their organization is one way to enrich the employee experience. During the Pandemic, employees whose tenure began and ended without ever stepping into a physical office have been replaced by other employees. IT and HR can work together to support each other.
Both HR and IT are connected at the beginning. Hardware is often sent to employees with limited guidance and complicated instructions, which can create a poor on-boarding experience. Delayed employee productivity and early aggravation can be caused by negative experiences. It’s important to personalize setup with IT-led video calls and a step-by-step checklist.
While ticketing systems and similar processes are essential for most large enterprise IT operations, properly explaining the systems to employees allows them to understand and use them, which raises the efficiency of IT across the organization.
5 tips for prioritizing the employee experience are included in the hybrid work.
2. Use AI for employee well-being
In order to retain employees, enterprise leadership teams have to change their behaviors. IT can use systems that encourage employees to prioritize their mental health and well-being in order to provide long-term options for remote and permanent accommodations.
IT can humanize the employee experience by providing calls to action to learn about mental health and available benefits, for example, or viewing data on how much time employees spend on emails and calls after hours to better understand work strain.
IT can help HR improve employee affinity by delivering the data to them.
Building a learning culture with artificial intelligence is the next topic.
Developing tools that empower employees to learn about one another forges relationships between teams.
3. Foster workforce connections
Tools that empower employees to learn about one another forge relationships between teams to further foster human connections. Ensuring that employees are actually using the tools that are incorporated into the employee experience is something that firms should invest in.
It’s important that these tools are gamified to drive near and long-term adoption. A shared employee connection is created regardless of where employees are located by rewarding and highlighting employee actions. Incentives and seeing which tools stick helps build camaraderie.
Don’t try to recreate what was normal before the Pandemic. In a new report from Harvard Business Review, learn from CIOs.
Successful digital transformation requires successful change management
The best technology in the world won’t guarantee worker productivity. Effective change management efforts need to ensure employees are able to use new tools and approaches in their work environment.
Get to know your employees. Some employees are willing to adopt new technologies. Some employees are able to figure out how to use new technologies, while others need more training and support. IT and HR teams will be able to work together to encourage tech adoption if they understand the different employee personas.
As the hybrid workplace becomes the industry standard for knowledge workers, creating an environment that facilitates human connections will become more important. I look forward to seeing the partnership between HR and IT continue to drive the employee experience in the digital workplace.
Want to know more about hybrid work? A hybrid work model has advantages.
