Tech industry analysts and observers are saying the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of “digital transformation” in companies by five to seven years. And they are saying many of these changes — including those brought about by the shift to remote work — are here to stay.
In McKinsey’s recent report, “How Covid-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping-point—and transformed business forever,” its respondents claimed to be “three times likelier now than before the crisis to say that at least 80 percent of their customer interactions are digital in nature,” and of the 93 percent of respondents that reported experiencing an increase in remote working or collaboration, 54 percent feel that those changes will stick, and 23 percent feel that it will not stick.
In areas like e-commerce and customer service, the focus on digital transformation has been mostly positive, as retailers have upped their game by creating digital experiences that keep consumers engaged on shopping websites and with AI-fueled chat bots that replace customer service agents.
But as HR rushes to transform its operations through automation, we need to ask ourselves an important question, and keep asking it again and again as we forge ahead in this increasingly digital world: Are we doing enough to foster human connection?
Human connection has never been more important. It’s a lesson we’ve learned from the pandemic, and it’s a new reality that follows us back into our workplaces and hybrid work-from-home models.
In a market where job openings are plentiful and employees — particularly the younger Millennials and Gen Zers — have high expectations for a great experience at their jobs, human connection matters even more. That’s because it helps to drive great candidate and employee experiences. Employing strategies that foster human connection is your ace in the hole for creating a resilient organization where you attract the best candidates and your best employees want to stay and grow with you.
Here are three ways to help ensure you are supporting effective human connection and employee engagement as your company or organization pursues its digital transformation:
Identify employee frustration points
As you do your strategic HR workforce and technology planning, think about all the points of frustration in your employee lifecycle – across recruiting, onboarding, development, health and wellness, compliance, employee relations and even off boarding. There will be points in each of these employee experiences where automation can either make things easier or create a point of dissonance, frustration or disconnection from the company that erodes employee loyalty.
Start by looking at a log of your most common HR calls and requests over the past two years. I say two years where I would normally say one because the pandemic shifted things and you need to see those deltas.
From those calls, look for patterns. What were the most common questions asked? Were the questions seasonal such as during open enrollment? Which answers could people have found themselves if they’d looked at your portal or other internal resources? Which questions were escalated to higher levels of support? Which ones affected your top talent or high potentials?
You would ask yourself these questions to develop a good FAQ. The difference is specifically looking at the nature of the questions and recognizing the questions where not getting a timely response could create a point of frustration or even friction. Timely responses tend to equate higher satisfaction ratings.
Identify the right moments for real human interaction
For those of us who are just trying to keep our heads above water with reduced staff, remote workers and dwindling resources, it’s easy to get excited about technology that takes things off our plates. The more you want it off your plate, the closer you need to look at automation AND look at it in the context of the employee frustration points identified above.
Self-service portals are great, but they only take people so far. AI chat bots that handle incoming questions may sound like a good idea, but for anything but basic FAQs they have their limits. Beyond being expensive and time-consuming to implement correctly (and correctly really matters here), they just don’t foster great employee experiences. Think about the number of times you’ve been on a website where the “interactive chatbot” had no clue what you were asking about, no matter how you typed the question. You either end up being forced to send an email (and wait for an asynchronous response), spend your valuable time looking things up yourself or just getting frustrated and giving up.
Is that the experience you want for your employees? Is that the experience you want for your best job candidates when they’re considering your competitors?
Those are the moments when you want to establish a connection with a real person who has an understanding of the company culture and practices. Whether your HR function is structured with a shared service center or not, make the help available on demand with real-time online chat or voice. The team behind the technology should be experienced enough to handle front line questions and know when to escalate for deeper inquiries that are not easily answered.
If you don’t have the staff resources to have someone available in real-time, consider outsourcing those front-line interactions to a professional live, HR shared service that is on call when you need them. Outsourcing may sound counter-intuitive to creating connections but it’s not. Having a well-trained HR professional who knows your company policies and procedures — and who is there to provide a human connection when your employees need it — is a lot more personal than an AI who has no read on emotion or critical thinking skills.
Create a cohesive culture, fight off the competition and retain your best
We’re in this interesting transition point toward the end of the pandemic where it feels like some companies are sprinting to bring their workforce back to the office, while others remain 100 percent remote, and the rest somewhere in between. Employee perceptions and attitudes are similar along the spectrum with regard to their preferences during this specific time. Gallup reported during their recent Workplace Summit that upward of 65 percent of employees, surveyed at the end of last year, prefer to work from home some of the time. The “sweet spot,” as reported by Gallup, is three days in office and rest is WFH.
We are very much in a candidate’s market with more jobs than people willing to take those jobs. We’re seeing a transference of power, in some sense, with employees expressing their preferences for fully remote and hybrid opportunities over traditional in office roles, and companies are making adjustments to accommodate.
Right now, every single employee in every single company is at risk of leaving. Employees who were once not at risk because of location are now available to be poached by companies — not just around the country but around the globe. If you are not keeping track of your high performers and high potentials, you can bet your competition is.
If you are working on a remote or hybrid model, it’s vital to create a cohesive culture to keep your distributed workforce connected with employees in the office. If this is a new model for your business, rapid change is needed. The best people to create a culture that delivers a positive employee experience whatever the work preference, are your best people. And that’s where culture ambassadors come in.
Similar to the best practice of creating mentors for new hires, developing a culture ambassadors initiative to support each team within your organization helps to support the values and voice of your employees. In addition to employee satisfaction and pulse surveys, a culture ambassador can be selected by their respective teams or managers to participate in the development of these cultural changes.
It is important this is not seen as an HR initiative or a management initiative rather a company-wide initiative to adapt to the macro dynamics of a post-pandemic workplace. Ultimately people want to be seen and heard, therefore the challenge is to replicate what happens organically in an office, digitally. For example, if you have a strong peer to peer recognition program in office, a culture ambassador can help promote a digital version to ensure remote employees feel equally involved whether it be mailed notes or digital kudos driven by engagement software.
This is not an automation, policy or process solution. This is a human connection solution that will drive the requirements for your technology solutions for on demand communications and collaboration with the workforce. Creating a cohesive culture unique to your employee preferences will put you ahead of the competition and help you retain your best talent.
Pardon the pun, but this is the glue that connects all three points into a cohesive, scalable strategy that will be able to flex with current and future workforce demands.