In the technology world, it’s all too easy to get carried away with features and capabilities and focus more on tech than people. But even the most advanced and sophisticated technology won’t fulfill its full potential for your organization if your employees aren’t at the center of your plans. So, in this article we’ll explore enhancing the employee experience – and how that benefits your business.

People-Centric Digital Transformation

It’s vital to prioritize improving employee experience in all your technology decisions and investments, because it sets your organization on the path for success – both now and in the long term. Making the right choices can help you to achieve:

1. More efficient and productive working for employees
2. Better connections between everyone in your business
3. Business growth and an increase in your ability to scale

It’s a mistake to think that enhancing the employee experience is just a matter of job satisfaction. While that should not be undervalued – and also impacts positively on your bottom line – it’s an oversimplification to think employee experience is just about making people happier. It’s about empowerment – and that’s a powerful, valuable thing.

Let’s start with the first one: greater efficiency and productivity.

1. More efficient and productive working

When employee experiences are poor, work takes longer and isn’t performed as effectively. And the technology your people use also makes all the difference here. If they’re working with disparate, disconnected tools and data sources instead of a more integrated, “joined-up” environment, it will naturally be more of a hassle to get anything done.

On the other hand, if employees are using a seamlessly integrated ecosystem like Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform, the amount of time and effort they spend switching between tools, and making them work together, is vastly reduced. They work quicker and more effectively, delivering more for your business.

Today, the Microsoft technology ecosystem is more integrated than ever before and is becoming more and more so every day. Hitching your wagon to this kind of technology environment is a surefire way to guarantee you’ll keep on improving employee experience long into the future – and getting the resulting benefits.

2. Better connections

Having modern, joined-up tools and infrastructure doesn’t just help employees work more efficiently and productively on their own. It also boosts their ability to collaborate, too.

With Microsoft Teams (part of the Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration suite), employees can make the most of a powerful platform for communicating and working together closely and effectively, wherever they are. It’s an experience that’s as close as possible to the consumer-aimed messaging and social media apps that employees know and love, making them happy and enthusiastic Teams adopters. And when people like a tool and are comfortable using it, they tend to use it well.

Teams is also tightly integrated with the rest of Microsoft’s ecosystem, including Word and Excel, as well as Power Platform tools like Power BI, which provides valuable business data reporting and analysis capabilities. All accessible in the same place people talk and work together.

3. Business growth

Sluggish, clunky business processes have a tendency to tie organizations down. When employees have their hands full with tedious, laborious manual work, that limits the time they have available for other matters that make full use of their expertise – and take your business forward.

Enter Microsoft Power Automate (previously Microsoft Flow), another element of the Power Platform. Using Power Automate, you can create timesaving “workflows” (simply known as Flows) that streamline all kinds of business processes, helping employees to complete them with speed and ease.

Because Power Automate is part of Microsoft’s integrated ecosystem, you can connect a wide range of other apps to your Flows using literally hundreds of pre-built connectors. These also include popular third-party apps and services like Salesforce and Google Drive. And that means those technology investments can work harder for your business – while your employees use their time and energy for the full benefit of business growth.

Lightening the Load With RPA

What’s more, you can also use robotic process automation (RPA) within Flows. This has the power to be a real game-changer. With Power Automate RPA, software robots (“bots”) can actually perform tasks within apps, like a human worker would. They can make clicks, copy and paste data, and more – and they do it fast. That means they can motor through a heavy workload of manual, repetitive data entry work, for instance, much quicker than an employee can. And all without typos, fatigue, or loss of job satisfaction.

When RPA bots take over these kinds of workloads, it doesn’t just free up employees for business development activities. It also increases your business’s capacity – for instance, allowing you to process more customer data capture forms, and do so within a better timeframe. Applying RPA in the right places can literally speed up your business – and employees will be thankful they’ve got bots helping them out with the “heavy lifting.”

Ready to start enhancing the employee experience?

So, as we’ve covered, the benefits of enhancing the employee experience are far-reaching, and are best supported by the right technology foundation. If there’s one key takeaway you should have here, it’s that integrated and connected tech most often delivers the best experiences – which, again, leads to the greatest business rewards. We think you’ll agree that’s a win-win situation.

If you’d like to explore how Worksighted can help with improving the employee experience with technology at your organization, just get in touch with our team.

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