Improving user experience for employees: digital transformation in the age of remote work. The first part of Transforming Organizational Culture for Digital Transformation Success explores the importance of employee user experience (UX) in a remote work environment. Learn strategies for adopting the right digital tools for the post-COVID-19 workplace and building efficient remote work systems.
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The importance of employee experience, user experience (UX) in the age of remote work
After COVID-19, many companies started to realize something new when they started working remotely: they started to look at their corporate IT systems (groupware of sorts) with a critical eye. Especially when compared to the various mobile services that we use in our daily lives, the company system was not very sophisticated.
When all members were working in the same space, they were willing to use it even if it was inconvenient, but this was not the case in the non-face-to-face environment of remote work. Moreover, the remote environment forced them to try other services, and as they looked at the company’s system objectively, complaints began to emerge. “It doesn’t work like this,” “It doesn’t auto-save, so I have to enter it anew every time,” “The editing screen and the output don’t match,” and these complaints naturally began to affect employees’ productivity and work style.
Historically, user experience (UX) has been a topic of concern for B2C services, but in the post-COVID-19 era of DX, we are beginning to recognize the importance of not only the digital user experience for customers, but also the user experience for employees. In a nutshell, if employees are comfortable and don’t experience any problems, they won’t resist using digital tools or adopting projects. Therefore, the experience and satisfaction of employees is the first and most important factor to ensure a successful DX journey.
The importance of digital tools to improve employee satisfaction
Once you’ve decided to adopt a SaaS digital tool, it doesn’t take much time to start using it. Most of them are available in the cloud without any special integration development, and the experience of using them isn’t much different than using many of the services you use every day. For example, tools like Teams and Slack are optimized for mobile and are easily accessible on the web.
In addition to your work PC, you can continue to work on your home PC or smartphone, and notifications work just as well as any other app. The user experience is not much different from the shopping apps and messaging apps that we often use in our daily lives. We don’t feel any less comfortable using shopping malls like Coupang or 11th Avenue, or messenger and portal services like KakaoTalk and Naver. This is because we have already had a lot of experience using them, and various services provide almost standardized user experiences.
However, when we think about the internal IT system used by our company, it is very frustrating. Even though I’m not in finance or accounting, I have to learn a fairly complex ERP system to apply for a corporate card or process expenses. If you’re not in HR and you want to perform a single HR-related function, you’ll have to learn the HR system’s screens and move on to step 2 and step 3. This is because corporate systems have historically adopted the systems provided by vendors and forced employees to use them, rather than focusing on employee convenience or user experience.
Imagine starting to work from home in this environment. You’re trying to access your company’s systems on a company-issued laptop, you haven’t signed up for a VPN for security, and you’re working from home for an extended period of time, and a new employee joins your team. You need to train them, give them an ID, issue them a laptop, etc. You could find a contact person and do this via email or phone, but it’s a bit complicated.
In a traditional face-to-face environment, this might not be a big deal, but in a non-face-to-face situation like working from home or remotely, these little things start to become a problem. Furthermore, as more and more users have experienced various types of IT services, they naturally want a similar experience within their company.
A practical approach to building an effective remote workforce
So why can’t the onboarding process for new hires be delivered like the messaging and commerce services we use every day? A new employee arrives at work, submits the required documents for each department with just a few clicks online, applies for a laptop and a work account, and then watches a video on basic skills training. Of course, this process can be done on a PC or mobile phone without any difficulty. In short, it’s a very pleasant groupware experience. Recently, there have been a number of alternatives that have been introduced to the market. One of the most prominent is ServiceNow.
Already used by 80% of the Fortune 500 companies in the US, ServiceNow is focused on improving the workplace. In the case of a new hire program, for example, ServiceNow takes the training that used to be scattered across departments and creates a single flow that automatically notifies you whenever a new hire completes it.
This means you don’t have to make phone calls or emails to departments and get approvals. These flows can be linked to digital tools such as Teams and Slack, as well as the company’s basic systems such as HR and ERP, giving users (new hires) the feeling of receiving a single service. By using these services to build a digital environment, employees will have a consistent user experience in a single mobile or web environment when using company systems, rather than a decentralized experience such as ERP, groupware, and project management. In short, a single service desk is all that’s needed to access corporate systems. The results are self-explanatory.
The importance of digital experience and culture for DX
When it comes to digital transformation (DT, DX, Digital Transformation), embedding a digital experience and culture within the organization is a critical first step. To do this, think of your IT systems from the perspective of the employee (user), rather than the supplier, and this is the first step towards not only improving the employee experience, but also increasing productivity and digitizing and logging everything that happens in the company.