There are many decision-makers in your organization who may budget for workplace experience technology, but these modern tools go beyond meeting a dollar amount. It’s important to outline how workplace technology can make a company-wide impact to improve everyone’s overall experience. The right solution will enable each stakeholder to meet their goals, while rejuvenating workplace culture and connection.
Below are just some examples of how workplace technology can benefit any organization’s top decision-makers.
The Workplace Experience Manager
With the focus on employee and workplace experiences on the rise, many companies are hiring Workplace Experience Managers to spearhead these efforts. Typically, someone in this role would be responsible for defining a company’s workplace experience vision and strategy. This means providing the space, technology, services, and programming to optimize employee engagement, as well as improving upon company culture and using data to understand the needs of every employee.
Common Frustrations: A Workplace Experience Manager might not always have the resources to deliver the heightened workplace experiences that they want to deliver. They also might have trouble keeping pace with evolving employee needs, since information might be scattered depending on where people work and they might lack the insights and feedback required to make ongoing improvements. This disconnect could lead to many things, including difficulty in communicating programming to hybrid employees and getting employees to adopt new processes, services, and tools – All of which can be an expensive and time-consuming process.
Technology Use-Case: A well-rounded employee experience platform can provide a single, easy-to-use app for employees to manage their workplace experience. This same app can also host content and events; facilitate desk, conference room, and parking booking; and collect meaningful insights on employee sentiment and an office’s space usage. Such a tool becomes a one-stop-shop for Workplace Experience Managers, which can inform future investments and ultimately cut down on office costs.
The Human Resources (HR) Director
Human Resources teams are becoming an increasingly more important role in the industry’s pivot to people-centered workplaces. Their responsibilities include important tasks like defining company goals and strategy related to staffing, recruiting, and retention; developing corporate plans for a variety of HR matters such as compensation, benefits, health, and safety; managing recruitment costs; building a highly engaging workplace culture; and helping employees build communities at work and create a strong sense of belonging.
Common Frustrations: Such a crucial, evolving role comes with a lot of modern-day challenges. For example, with the Great Resignation still ongoing, increasing employee turnover makes it difficult for companies to hire staff. HR teams also need to ensure that all employees remain healthy and safe, as well as engaged and motivated to do their best amid hybrid work models. They face low adoption rates of employee services and perks, and lack the engagement data needed to make the cultural impact that they want to make.
Technology Use-Case: Workplace technology gives HR teams the analytics, communication tools, space management tools, wellness services, and other capabilities to meet their goals. This means that it can increase employee engagement, contributing to higher employee retention and leading to a reduction in hiring and onboarding costs. Higher engagement also means higher productivity due to time-savings, increased awareness of employee resources, services and perks, and an overall safer and healthier workplace.
The Information Technology (IT) Director
IT Directors are also playing a key role in the modern workplace. Their jobs are to continuously improve their company’s technology stack and security, as well as controlling and evaluating their IT and electronic data operations. For them, it’s important to facilitate a great experience of IT tools for employees while maintaining enterprise security, by integrating the physical world into a user-friendly digital environment.
Common Frustrations: With most of the workforce hybrid, it can be difficult for IT teams to onboard new employees due to scattered information and services. IT teams also have to navigate a low usage of company-provided resources due to employees being unaware of them or unhappy with the end-user experience. This leads to a low adoption of technology investments, and a disparate set of tools that are owned and used by different internal stakeholders – thus increasing the risk of a security breach.
Technology Use-Case: An employee experience app can take all current integrations and unify them in a single location. Additionally, a robust platform-powered tool like HqO’s Workplace Experience Platform meets security protocols such as ISO, SOC-2, and more – all while offering high-security features like SSO and access control. This improves the employee experience without having to change current IT systems and processes, as well as maintains enterprise securities while it streamlines the technology onboarding and maintenance processes.
The Real Estate (RE) Director
Real Estate Directors manage all real estate-related costs, including those related to a company’s portfolio analysis and technology stack. Since they own the strategic planning and development of a company’s real estate portfolio to support organizational growth, having tools that can help them inform decisions, manage vendor relationships, and oversee the design and construction processes is a high priority.
Common Frustrations: Since Real Estate Directors oversee entire portfolios, they may have difficulty finding ways to decrease operational building costs, decrease unused office suite space due to hybrid work, and understand the right amount of physical space and services needed to support the workforce.
Technology Use-Case: Having workplace experience technology helps Real Estate Directors with capacity planning, space utilization, and employee feedback and usage. This is due to the meaningful insights that an end-to-end platform can provide, which help to make more informed decisions on future investments and reveal opportunities for space efficiency gains.
The Facilities Management (FM) Director
Facilities Management Directors provide a workplace experience that supports employees in their needs and expectations. This means they focus on things such as monitoring and managing the assets and technologies in the workplace to maximize return-on-investment; maintaining and continuously improving building and vendor partnerships; optimizing processes that facilitate everyday operations, and ensuring compliance with regulations and laws.
Common Frustrations: Because of the vast nature of the job, Facilities Management might have trouble accessing the insights needed about building usage and employee feedback. They also might struggle with controlling energy consumption, balancing multiple stakeholder relationships, and managing, distributing, and tracking service requests that come in from different end-users through multiple channels such as email or phone.
Technology Use-Case: Workplace experience technology can facilitate necessary functions such as access control, visitor management, service requests, cleaning requests, and employee communications. With an employee experience app, Facilities Management can benefit from tools and services that are integrated into a single platform, which also provides important data and analytics to help optimize space and reduce costs.
These use-cases reveal that no matter what your role is in your organization, workplace experience technology can seamlessly integrate with your existing processes and systems, speed up previously inefficient work flows, and reduce stressors for all of your employees – ultimately promoting a flexible work environment that supports every facet of a hybrid workforce.
Want to learn more about how technology can enhance the employee experience? Download our latest industry guide, Investing in Employee Experience.
