Today, in the eleventh year of an economic growth cycle, employee burnout has become a huge problem. With a myriad of tools, targets and emails to keep up with and countless distractions, juggling busy workloads and keeping on top of to-do lists can feel like a full time job.
So how can the HR industry help its employees avoid burnout? A new idea, known as the “experience platform” has emerged, shifting the focus of the employer/employee relationship. Over the years there has been a movement from loyalty (how the employer takes care of the employee) to engagement (making the employee happy) to the experience, which is all about making work more fun, rewarding and interesting every day.
Vendors now sell employee experience platforms, learning experience platforms, talent experience platforms and end to end case management and knowledge management tools to help employees find exactly what’s right for them. AI is likely to change this space in a big nway, and the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook are all trying to build the “front door” to their worlds with Alexa, Google Voice, and other tools we can talk to.
While these are primarily seen as tools for navigating our home lives, there is huge potential for voice activated technologies to transform our work lives too. AI is enabling the employee experience to be a conversational one, embedded into the flow of work. In an experience-oriented application, the designer changes the focus from what the system wants you to do to what you want the system to do for you.
Moments That Matter
We use the terms “employee journeys” or “moments that matter” to study what employees do every day, building systems that model and mimic those actions to make them easier. HR departments are changing their whole service delivery model in line with this new way of thinking, to ensure their employees receive support that’s tailored to their individual needs. Once we think about all the different interactions and journeys that employees go through, we realize that we need a combination of multi-disciplinary service teams and IT to provide the right level of support.
From a technology point of view, it’s also important to recognize that employees are looking for “mobile first” solutions that can be used on the go. This means that the traditional HR software model, where companies first built web based systems that could be adapted for mobile use, is going away.
