Editorial
Organizations tend to focus on employee onboarding and offboarding, and rightly so. They are important experiences. But there is wide gulf between onboarding and offboarding in which everything else happens. Most of the time, things go right — but sometimes they go wrong. Communications, IT and HR professionals in particular need to keep an eye on this chasm, because in addition to internal digital communications and collaboration, we should focus on improving internal digital services. By doing so, we can help employees stay with an organization for the long haul.
Onboarding and Offboarding...
For years, organizations have been working hard to attract and land new employees. Once you’ve found four folks, a good onboarding process ensures they can work in your organization in a healthy and productive way. After all, many new hires decide within a matter of weeks — sometimes, within days — if they want to stay with your company. Strong onboarding is crucial for employee retention.
Organizations are also paying more attention to employees who are leaving or have recently left. Those who look back on their time at a given organization with warm feelings are more likely to recommend others to work for that organization or perhaps even return to the nest in due time. Good offboarding is important to turn former colleagues into ambassadors, and possibly into employees once again.
Related Article: Digital Employee Experience Transformation Isn’t Just About Efficiency
... and What Happens In-Between
There is a chasm between onboarding and offboarding. Not that nothing happens there, of course: Someone’s entire working tenure falls between those milestones. That chasm encompasses the time from the first days to, potentially, promotion, perhaps even of growth from a junior role into a leadership position.
During this time, employees point to various things that interfere with their well-being and productivity. Some don’t feel seen or heard by executives. Others experience an overload of poorly-managed information, stored in fragmented applications. Others still have not been able to learn digital skills for today’s type of work.
Communication, Collaboration... and Services
That gulf leaves many people feeling disappointed, not involved in their work or sometimes even actively disengaged and unhappy. There are many, many aspects to this “missing” engagement, but one specific missing element is crucial: In the world of internal digital communication and collaboration, internal digital services to employees remain the most important, but most often forgotten, aspect of the digital work environment.
Digital workplace solutions are often about news and information, social interaction and collaboration, and that’s all important! First and foremost, however, a digital workplace must support employees in their daily work. It should facilitate the things that simply need to happen, and help people just get their sh*t done.
What am I talking about when I talk about internal digital services? Two things:
- Everything that supports the real work, and makes it better and easier.
- Everything that supports work-about-work, and makes that better and easier.
What Is the “Real” Work?
Most employees in your organization don’t consume news, look up information and share knowledge with colleagues digitally all day long. (At least, probably not.) The :real: work is something completely different for many people. For example:
- In healthcare: Caring for or treating patients or clients.
- In education: Teaching students or conducting research.
- In logistics: Storing goods, preparing them for transport and transporting them to customers.
- In hospitality: Serving restaurant or hotel guests.
The examples are endless — tradespeople installing wires or fixing pipes, assembly-line workers in manufacturing, every worker in every sector. Though all these groups of people face different jobs and different tasks, they are all often best helped in daily practice by continuously optimizing internal digital services. Research I have conducted for years across various organizations highlights this time and time again: What people expect from a digital work environment is better, simpler support for their primary work.
What can you think of? Let’s compare to the list of sectors I listed above:
- Healthcare: A nurse or home care worker who needs direct access to a patient file or to treatment protocols.
- Education: Teachers or tutors who can easily access student information on any device.
- Logistics: Simple overview of order information and which items are where.
- Hospitality: Quick access to occupancy overview or overview of reservations.
- Technicians Who need work instructions for a certain type of installation or equipment.
What Are Additional Tasks?
To increase adoption of internal digital platforms you need to create step-by-step improvement of internal services, both large and small, streamlining things that may currently be handled through a series of very diverse and often outdated applications.
The additional, supporting or secondary tasks and processes, regardless of the sector, are the everyday tasks that can be far more difficult for employees than they need to be, such as:
- Booking leave.
- Finding a colleague.
- Reserving a meeting room.
- Submitting a support ticket.
- Reporting a malfunction.
These are tasks that hundreds, or sometimes even thousands of employees, have to perform on a daily basis. A few minutes of time saved per colleague per month can make quite a difference. Less time spent fighting a digital system is more time to talk with a patient, some extra help for a student, just a little better processing of a product delivery or a little personal attention for a customer.
Related Article: Your Employees’ Experience Is Broad. Your Intranet Needs to Fit
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Poor Digital Service Drives Employees Away…
There are countless reasons why people trade one employer for another. Managers are often a key reason why someone will stay with or leave a particular role. Recently, a lack of flexibility for remote and hybrid working has also proven to be a reason people look for another job. Recent research shows that “work-about-work,” all those additional, supportive or secondary tasks, takes up more than half of the working day. And that only 33% of the day is spent on the real thing. That’s a reason to quit, isn’t it?
… and Good Service Keeps Them On Board
I believe that internal digital services can and must be improved. It is a subject on which we as communication, HR and IT professionals have influence. We can offer people the right services, facilitate findability and user-friendliness, select and develop better tools and improve processes step by step. This way we can ensure that service is no longer a barrier to productivity, make time and space for the real work, reduce stress and simply make people a little happier in their work.
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