Here are three ways to improve employee experience and retain the best talent.
The war for talent is real and it’s happening everywhere around the world, in countries from all sides of the Gross National Income spectrum. In the US, the employee turnover rate has been at its highest in 10 years, and north of the border, the unemployment rate reached a 40-year low in late 2018.
Failure to attract and retain skilled talent is a major hindrance to business growth. And with 45 percent of employers around the world reporting difficulty filling roles, it is no longer a question of simply finding talent but of retaining talent: we must start with improving employee experience.
By now, HR leaders have tried implementing a variety of tactics to create an environment where employees feel welcomed and valued, such as revamping employee onboarding processes or leading value-driven culture programs. Further, cognizant of the growing millennial workforce projected to occupy 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, many organizations may have already started the transition from a traditional 9-to-5 work schedule to something a little more flexible and performance-oriented. While all these are useful employee engagement tactics, it’s important to keep in mind that these methods may take a long time to bear fruit.
So for those seeking low-hanging fruit opportunities to empower employees in these uncertain times, technology—more specifically AI—should be on your radar. The following are three ways organizations can improve employee experience with an AI-powered search and recommendation solution; invite your employees fall in love with their jobs again.
Three Ways Digital Workplaces Can Improve Employee Experience
1. Treat employees as customers
“In 2019, employers need to understand that candidates are consumers too and work hard to attract workers with a strong employee value proposition, clear purpose and attractive culture.” — Becky Frankiewicz, President of ManpowerGroup North America, HR Drive
There is a lot of talk about reinventing the employee value proposition and even more chatter about what it should entail. All things considered, it really boils down to respecting employees as you would respect your customers. Would you want or expect customers to soldier through a disjointed, incoherent and irrelevant digital experience in search for what they need? The answer is probably no. It’s time to respect your employees’ time, especially their limited time on the job. Make sure that the most relevant content is delivered to them right when they need it.
Being relevant sounds simple enough at first but many intranets are still stuck in the past with stagnant content that is both impersonal and irrelevant to the individual employee. AI-powered search provides a contextually relevant digital experience to every employee, every time, by automatically understanding what the most relevant content is for each employee, and recommending only that which is individually useful.
2. Help employees upskill naturally
Upskilling naturally is a goal most organizations have but tend to miss the mark more often than not. That is because beyond the formal training and coursework employees will do as part of their upskilling program, employers fail to facilitate knowledge management in their everyday work. Employee development hinges on how well internal knowledge is stored, shared and improved. Unfortunately in many organizations, knowledge management infrastructure is siloed and difficult to navigate; information within organizations is scattered across disparate systems. Almost 6 out of 10 knowledge workers have indicated that they spend roughly 75 percent of their time solving issues that have been solved before.
Embracing the mess, especially in the context of knowledge management, may be the perfect way to sum up AI-powered search and recommendations technology’s ability to gather information from everywhere, any source, any silo no matter how unstructured. Making knowledge accessible and shareable is imperative for organizations that want to enable employees to learn more, do more and act with more autonomy. After all, people are most engaged when what they are interacting with is the most relevant information to them. Naturally, they will integrate the acquired information directly into their work, and become more proficient–something that they were probably hired to do in the first place.
If ever new or additional content is required to support employees on their journey to proficiency, the self-learning intelligent search and behavioral data from past queries can help identify what those are. Search usage analytics can help determine content gaps, content that is underperforming and content that’s in-demand.
These insights can help organizations get the right information in front of the right audience in order to steer their corporate strategies in the right direction. After all, the impact of an intelligent workplace is striking: a Fortune 50 healthcare company reports a 12 times faster time-to-competency in new employees. Learn more.
3. Build a community, not just a resource center
In a fast changing business landscape, only 15 percent of employees worldwide feel engaged in their jobs, while the other 85 percent admit to functioning below potential. It’s more than obvious that employers need to make a massive shift in how they create workplace cultures that increase employee engagement. As Maya Angelou famously put it: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
What if an AI-powered search platform could breathe new life into your employee portal and make it a place where employees can network, collaborate, learn and share information more fluidly? By providing a more personalized experience and connecting employees to each other, you’ll help build morale and foster a sense of community working together to achieve your organizational goals. Sound like a perfect pairing to your core values campaign? We think yes.
These are only three steps between your current state and meeting your talent attraction and retention goals. We’re sharing more at the TSIA webinar on employee experience on March 28. Register today.