Martin Owen is CEO of Quark Software and is an expert in data and content management technologies for digital transformation.
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If employees are not engaged and happy and do not have a sense of purpose, it affects your organization's ability to meet business objectives. Even one poor performer within a team can prove costly.
Recognition, appreciation and an assurance that their opinion is heard—and counts—are all contributing factors in empowering employee productivity. However, one aspect that has not gotten the attention it deserves is how technologies deployed across your organization contribute to optimal employee performance and job satisfaction or how missing technologies can have the opposite effect.
Enterprises have an exorbitant number of technologies to choose from that contribute to the human experience. They make it easier for people to do their work and be more efficient as technologies can automate business processes and repetitive tasks, fuel better communication and collaboration across global teams and offer personalized, professional development opportunities.
Let’s look at three key functional business use cases and the role technology plays in supporting the people experience.
1. Onboarding New Employees
Delivering successful onboarding experiences to new employees is an opportunity to make a great first impression—one in which the employee is excited to be part of the company. Onboarding new employees involves several steps that help them acclimate to their new role and the organization. A lot of paperwork related to employee incentives, training, corporate culture and policies are just a few things that must be absorbed during their first week on the job.
However, the technology tools that employees use play a day-one-and-beyond role in how they work effectively. For example, if you hire a designer tasked with working with a team to create content that engages external audiences and supports the business objective, they will need to have access to the tools that ensure content output is on corporate brand and supports global and regional outputs.
Failure to do so results in a new employee quickly learning they are overwhelmed with multiple requests for the same template designs over and over again because these documents aren’t easily accessible in a centralized location within the enterprise operations infrastructure. This can quickly disengage an employee who was hired for a specialty skill set.
2. Interconnectivity Across Departments
People are hired to fill a specific role; however, people in different departments must also interact with one another to achieve a company’s business goals and objectives. Your technology infrastructure is at the foundation of effective interdepartmental communication and its ability to deliver results that benefit the entire organization.
For example, many people across different departments are involved in creating enterprise content—from subject-matter experts to business managers, global IT ops managers and graphic designers. The technology infrastructure is the glue that keeps this team connected, allowing them to contribute their unique skills and support the greater business content output.
Failure to leverage technologies can lead to team members working in silos and an inability to unify team members in support of a specific goal. An employee’s individual contribution to a successful output is fueled by technology and directly supports their next step forward in achieving a personal and professional goal.
3. Reporting To The Board
Reporting results to the board can be a challenging process for any executive, particularly during difficult times. Expectations are high as executives report that sales numbers are—or are not—on track with projections and explain whether corporate investments are trending to achieve desired ROIs.
When a chief marketing officer, for example, reports the results of a content strategy investment, technologies support their ability to report specifically how a piece of content is being consumed by a target audience, if at all. It also alerts them when it’s time to shift a strategy early in a campaign cycle to divert bottom-line impact.
This is achieved by insight into content analytics that lets you know whether the content published is achieving desired results and/or how market shifts could impact content velocity. It positions this executive as having a smart plan with the ability to deliver a path to profitability (if necessary) and address the concerns of the board and shareholders as the answers are all found in the analytics.
Executives reporting to the board require a clear strategy and plan that, if successful, gives employees a sense of purpose, direction and motivation to achieve the company’s goals. Failure to leverage technologies results in a potential failure to provide answers to the success or failure of an investment to the board.
Conclusion
Emerging technologies have no signs of slowing down. This will continually put organizations in the hot seat of deciding what employees of the business can, or how they would like to, benefit from new technology adoption to improve the people experience.
Offering competitive incentives and fostering a healthy, inclusive workplace culture that welcomes ideas from every employee will always be paramount to motivating people, but the technologies you deploy throughout your organization play a crucial role, too.
And then there’s what you don’t deploy. The denial of requests for new technologies can cause a wide-reaching ripple effect, sending a signal across departments that holding on to money is more important than giving the employees the tools they need to be successful and contribute to the growth of the business.
Remember, how your employees work on the inside directly impacts how successful you are as a company and heavily influences how you are perceived on the outside.
Happier employees equate to happier customers, so keeping pace with technologies and determining which technologies can best support employee productivity and professional growth will safeguard long-term growth
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