Feature
Many employers believe the more tech tools they provide, the better outcomes they’ll see. HR uses technology to crunch data, help employees navigate benefits and vacation time, streamline onboarding, expand self-service and automate check-ins. The goal of all of this technology is to make work easier, more personal and more efficient.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Employees find piling on technology makes life more confusing, more fragmented and at times, more dehumanizing. In other words, more tech doesn’t necessarily lead to a better employee experience.
Employee experience includes everything a worker does, sees, learns and feels throughout their tenure at a company. When workers are faced with too many systems, those interactions — or the employee-worker relationship as a whole — become more transactional and repetitive, disconnecting employees from their work.
In fact, research from Gartner found that fewer than a third of employees feel engaged and connected to their work, despite the investment companies make in digital and HR systems.
Meanwhile, a report on digital employee experience from security software company Ivanti showed that a constantly expanding toolset and digital friction can negatively impact morale.
The Excess of Tools Is Harming Employee Experience
These concerns haven’t stopped technology’s momentum. HR teams are under constant pressure to shift from paper to cloud, from reactive support to proactive service and from manual workflows to automation. In the rush to continue work through the pandemic, many organizations added tools for onboarding, virtual check-ins, chatbots and self-service, often without full integration, employee testing or workflow redesign.
The result: sprawling HR tech stacks that do many things, but may not do them particularly well.
Put another way, deploying new systems didn’t help employee experience. Employees today have to navigate multiple log-ins. Automated nudges feel impersonal. Self-service portals drop users into forms rather than a human conversation. An approach designed to enhance experience ends up in frustration.
This is called digital friction, when technology intended to make life easier instead slows the user down. The more systems employees must use, the more silos they navigate, the more procedures they must remember, the lower their satisfaction. When digital workplaces are not properly designed, employees may lose hours each week because of how their tools work — or don’t work — together, Ivanti’s research found.
Is HR Focused on the Right Outcomes?
HR teams often focus on efficiency: fewer manual tasks, faster workflows, streamlined access to service delivery. But speed and automation are not the same thing as experience. Another study by Gartner found that only 35% of HR leaders are confident their technology approach aligns with business objectives (including the employee experience). Even worse, 46% think technology is working against them.
The solution to all this, at least in part, is to think about “better experience” rather than “more tools.” That’s another argument for keeping users at the forefront of technology design and deployment efforts. Rather than think about technology-enabled HR, HR executives and business leaders need to think about human-centered design as a foundation block of their roadmaps.
What does this mean in practice?
- Slow down and audit what already exists. What systems do employees actually use? How many clicks does a user need to make during onboarding? How many tools overlap? Using the answers to these questions to create solutions may not be sexy, but it can have a direct impact on employee experience.
- Understand the intersection between employees and technology. Of course, HR and software developers must know the actions a system takes to do its job. But they also must understand how employees react to each step, the context they’re working in and the barriers they face. For example, when does a human conversation work better than a machine-generated prompt? Where does automation support humans’ work rather than replace it? Avoid building automation for automation’s sake.
- Design solutions around experiences, not features. Employers need to think more about integrations — how systems can work together — instead of just what each system does. Can context switching be reduced? Does a new tool integrate with platforms employees already use?
- Look at what you’re measuring. Successful implementation is about satisfaction as much as adoption rates and login counts. How many steps does it take to complete a task? How does a solution fit into an employee’s workflow? Remember successful development projects are about factors such as communication, context and culture as much as clicks, cost and schedule.
For example, a chatbot designed to manage benefit queries may work as intended. But if it’s not properly integrated with the HR portal, people may end up having to click through multiple applications to finalize one task. If employees get frustrated, they may reach out to an HR representative for help, just as they did before. In this case, the company has essentially increased its technology commitment without improving the employee experience or helping lighten HR's load.
Sometimes More Tools Just Means More Confusion
HR technology doesn’t have to be constantly expanding. While today’s AI-driven systems may be better at personalizing the employee experience, personalization isn’t a substitute for context, design or trust.
At the same time, AI-based automation supports key moments in the employee lifecycle such as onboarding, feedback and manager check-ins. Companies that treat automation as optimization, not elimination, of touchpoints are more likely to offer a valuable experience.
Piling on systems, automations and tools without considering how they’ll change the employee experience cause more harm than good. The idea is not to add tools, but to work smarter. HR leaders must make human experience a priority, simplify their stack, carefully integrate systems and set up automation to serve humans – not the other way around.
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Editor's Note: Read more about the relationship between digital tools and employee experience:
- A Comprehensive, Actionable Model for Employee Experience — A common approach to employee experience tells you to improve the "moments that matter." I suggest you should pay attention to the other 90% of employees' time.
- Navigate Digital Workplace Complexity With These DEX Principles — Our digital workplaces have become bloated with apps. It's time we all do what Lotus's Colin Chapman recommended: simplify, then add lightness.
- Bridging Business and User Context: The Second Principle of Digital Employee Experience — Successful DEX bridges the needs of employees with the goals of the business. Here's how to reach that balance.
