This is part of a series of posts exploring the employee experience, that is, creating a place where employees actually want to show up, not where they need to show up. This series will explore what I define as the three employee experience environments that all organizations much focus on which are: physical, cultural, and technological. This is a growing area that I am extremely passionate about because it sees organizations shifting away from thinking of work as a utility to actually focusing on creating what Pat Wadors (the chief Human Resources Officer of LinkedIn) calls “beautiful experiences.”
As a starting point you can read this post on “Why The Future of Work is All About The Employee Experience.” The first post in this series looked at the physical environment and today I will explore the technological environment. The upcoming posts will explore culture and look at some frameworks and models for creating experiences.
The technological environment of the organization refers to the tools employees use to get their jobs done. This includes everything from the internal social network your company might use to the mobile devices that are approved to the laptops, desktops, and video conferencing solutions that employees have access to. This also includes any apps, software, e-learning tools, and user experience and design elements that impact how employees use these various tools. Technology is the central nervous system of the organization and most concepts and themes related to the future of work are not possible without technology.
It's not hard to see why technology is such a big part of the employee experience. If you show up to work and are forced to use technologies that were considered "cool" in the 90s then clearly you're going to be a bit frustrated with getting your job done. Using outdated and poorly designed technologies will: make it harder for your to communicate and collaborate with employees, drastically increase the amount of time it takes you to get your job done, and create an environment that sees you being frustrated, angry, and unproductive instead of being engaged, happy, and productive.
Here are a few things organizations should do to leverage technology as an enabler to create positive employee experiences.
Understand emerging technologies
Organizations can't improve what they don't understand which means it's crucial to keep an ongoing pulse on what's going on in the world of technology. Things like big data, wearable devices, the internet of things, collaboration tools, internal social networks, and robots and automation are all a part of the technology stack that organizations must understand. There's no secret here for what to do, read relevant publications, attend conferences, speak with other organizations, buy books, etc. It's not hard to understand what the various types of technologies are.
Observe how employees work
This was crucial in creating physical workspaces and it's just as important when thinking about technology. Oftentimes organizations will deploy technologies which meet requirements instead of meeting needs. In other words they focus on specifications and look at this as an IT related effort instead of an employee experience effort. This is a mistake. Instead of simply looking at requirements from a spec sheet try to actually understand what employees need from their technologies and why they use certain tools. At EY (Ernst & Young) for example they realized that employees were using technologies not approved by corporate. Instead of shutting these things down they turned these "rogue" employees into evangelists by observing how and why employees used their own tools instead of the ones that EY was providing.
Experiment, experiment, experiment
This is crucial. In order to understand new technologies and the impact they might have on your organization as whole it's important to actually test new technologies. You can have beta groups within the organization where employees volunteer to test emerging technologies in controlled environments. This allows the organization to mitigate risk while extracting valuable lessons learned that can later scale across broader deployments.
Focus on needs instead of requirements
As mentioned above a requirements is a specification on a piece of paper that might say something like "must enable commenting" or "must work with Android" but it makes no mention of that actually looks like or employees actually interact with the device or software. Which means that a particular feature might be enabled but to use it is a pain in the neck, in that case, what's the point of enabling something that doesn't meet the needs of how employees actually want to use it? Regardless of what technologies we are taking about here it's crucial to bring employees into the process by understanding how they work. Technology can be a powerful enabler but employees must tell you how they want to be enabled.
The future of workplace technology is indeed a very exciting space to watch and it will continue to change. It's important for organizations to look at technology as one part of the three employee experience environments (culture, technology, and physical space). How we work is just as important as why and where we work.
In upcoming posts I will look at culture as well as provide some frameworks and visuals for designing and creating employee experiences. In the meantime I’d love to hear from you so leave me a comment below!
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. To have Jacob speak at your event, see his videos, podcasts and articles, or to subscribe to his newsletter visit TheFutureOrganization.
