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6 Ways Existing Tech Can Improve Employee Experience

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Questions of “experiences” in business often focus on those of the customer–and not without cause. The ideal customer experience makes it easy for consumers to learn about your company and access its goods and services. The same logic applies to the employee experience as well. After all, you want to remove as many barriers as possible between your workers and the essential tasks they need to perform.

The smoother the employee experience is, the more efficient, effective, and satisfied your team will be in the long run. While every office will have different areas in need of improvement, here are six easy ways to improve the employee experience with tech you likely already have available to you.

Smoothing Out the Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the first real taste of your business for employees, and that taste is rarely as sweet as many wish. This is due in no small part to the dearth of resources and personnel devoted to this critical process. According to a survey conducted by payroll services provider OnPay, over 60 percent of small businesses have their HR handled either by the head of the company or by an employee who also juggles other responsibilities. That means employee onboarding can–and too often, does–take a back seat to other duties.

Thankfully, the right tools can help facilitate onboarding without making any greater demands of your existing team members. Some automated HR platforms, like PulseHRM and Namely, can help set up direct deposits and deploy mechanisms to ensure compliance with company policy. Relying on automated onboarding processes will let you focus more of your energy on the more human elements of the process, such as acquainting them with office culture.

Streamlining Communication

Anyone who’s ever even set foot in an office knows just how critical good communication is to the work environment. But it’s not just the efficacy that’s at stake here. In a 2019 survey from employee experience platform Dynamic Signal, 80 percent of the American workforce reported feeling stressed because of ineffective company communication. With numbers that high, your business simply cannot afford to ignore whatever communication issues might exist.

Every business has a whole suite of communication tools at their disposal—Slack, Teams, email, Zoom, and so on. But the key here is not to let your employees get stuck in the cracks between them. Choose one or two platforms and stick to them. Hopping around between different platforms is a surefire way to put the burden of communication management on the workers who can handle it the least. Whatever software you opt for, opt for it all the way. In the end, simplicity and efficiency are your team’s best friends when it comes to communication.

Facilitating Collaboration

Collaboration may go hand-in-hand with communication. However, work teams must tackle these two soft skills on their own terms. Effective communication platforms are vital for keeping an office running smoothly, of course. Simultaneously, collaboration tools like ClickUp and Asana are an absolute must for ensuring projects are completed on time and with care. With remote work promising to have a permanent impact on the way companies operate, collaboration-enabling tech is a must for just about every business.

This far into the pandemic, this shouldn’t be new news to anyone. In fact, Salesforce reports that 86 percent of executives identify ineffective collaboration as a major cause of failure in business. So there should be no hesitation when it comes to embracing tech that makes collaboration easier. Of particular interest should be platforms that help facilitate collaborative equity. For instance, tracking the volume of tasks and amount of time each worker spends on a specific project ensures that no employee’s experience has to come at the expense of another’s.

Compliance

“Meeting with HR” has long been a specter of the modern office, a dreaded event no matter what the reason. Thankfully, service providers have flooded the market with technology that ensures worker compliance through digital means instead of requiring endless strings of face-to-face meetings. HR platforms like Oasis Advantage and ComplianceHR ensure that employee paperwork is always in good order. More are starting to crop up that make it easier for workers to report incidences of misbehavior without the potential snag of an in-person confrontation.

Overall, leveraging these digital platforms makes it much easier to guarantee a safe and satisfying employee experience for all.

Offering Flexibility

Flexibility may be the single most significant gap between the attitude of employees and employers in the world of work. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, some 96 percent of US-based professionals want flexibility in their work. And yet, only 47 percent of workers actually have that flexibility. This is primarily due to the long-subscribed-to logic that an out-of-office worker is a less productive one–a myth that the COVID-19 crisis all but shattered overnight.

Modern project management software and digital communication tools like Monday.com and Slack allow employees to fully plug in no matter where they are. For some workers, this could mean greater travel opportunities. For others, it could allow for more time with loved ones at home. Regardless of why an employee desires flexibility, the right tech can help facilitate without a blip in productivity.

Dynamic Training Systems

Job descriptions constantly mutate as businesses themselves grow and evolve. A couple of decades ago, professional retraining was a long, laborious process involving months or years on a college campus. Today, there are more virtual courses and mini-degrees available than any one person could possibly manage. You can take a look at Lynda.com and Open Culture to get an idea of what’s available. The opportunities for succinct, targeted training are greater than ever before. This also means that workers can grow and expand their skill sets. And they can do so without significant interruptions to their careers, facilitating the employee experience in a big way.

Employee experience is the single greatest contributing factor in determining employee satisfaction. By working to make your workers’ lives easier, they’ll work to do the same for you. A happy employee is a productive one. And by ensuring the former, you can all but guarantee the latter.

So, with the sole focus of improving employee experience, leverage existing tech. Your team members, and your bottom line, will thank you.

Photo: ThisisEngineering RAEng

Hiring Tech Talent? Tap this Overlooked Pipeline

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Over the past decade, and even more so in our current economic state, more areas of life have become increasingly digitized. That evolution has certainly affected hiring practices. Applicant training systems, for instance, can collect, sort, and rank thousands of résumés, automatically surfacing top candidates for any given role. Chatbots can engage, source, and screen candidates based on a set of predetermined metrics like skills and education.

But with all of these advancements in recruiting and hiring, one thing has remained relatively stagnant: credential requirements. Most companies still require candidates to have a college degree. But in industries like technology, where the way people learn new skills is rapidly evolving, that requirement is creating a barrier.

Traditional hiring practices simply can’t keep up with the tech industry’s increasing talent needs. Sure, some aspiring tech workers are still taking the conventional education-to-job pathway by obtaining computer science degrees. But fewer than 60,000 computer science graduates enter the market each year, and that’s a tiny talent pool for companies to compete over.

Still, many qualified, talented technologists who took different routes to learn their skills are screened out of the hiring process due to companies’ outdated hiring criteria. Employers would do themselves a favor by opening up their minds and candidate criteria to other options.

Alternative Talent Pipelines

On top of producing a low supply of workers for a field with high demand for talent, many traditional colleges and universities are often hamstrung in evolving their curriculums. They just can’t do it fast enough to keep up with the evolving skills employers are looking for. It’s simply not feasible to change course curriculum as quickly as computer programming languages change.

Take JavaScript, for example. It’s become an extremely popular language for web development over the past couple of years. To secure a job in the field, you need to know not only JavaScript, but also frameworks like Angular or React. Yet these frameworks are changing almost every year, putting colleges and universities with inflexible curriculums at a huge disadvantage. It often takes more than a year to get the approvals necessary to change the curriculum.

Other tech training programs, however, like online courses or in-person boot camps, can more quickly pivot their curriculum to match changes in industry trends, equipping students with the right skills to meet employer needs. For this reason, alternative skilling programs can also produce talent much quicker than two- or four-year degree programs.

Alternative skilling programs have the flexibility to accelerate curriculum and churn out qualified programmers in mere months. They give students the basic skills they need to jump into a tech role. Then, employees are expected to learn on the job — a huge advantage to any company looking to shape unique skill sets, especially when 87% of IT executives are struggling to find skilled technology professionals today.

On top of developing relevant skills from a more agile learning environment more quickly, many alternative training graduates possess additional capabilities that can benefit employers. Here are a few:

Broader Life Experience

Graduates from nontraditional backgrounds often bring unmatched life experience into their new careers. Alternative coding students often enter programs with a breadth of different backgrounds — both vocational and educational. In fact, many already have college degrees in nontechnical fields and have enrolled in tech training programs to explore a career change.

Whereas two- or four-year college graduates likely just left home to go to college and then went straight into job searching, nontraditional students have had different life experiences that grant them additional perspectives and soft skills to bring to the table.

For example, a single mother who graduates from a coding boot camp is likely to be an excellent multitasker, as she’s raised her child while coordinating her education on her own. Or a former restaurant manager who joined an alternative training program to explore an interest in tech is likely to have strong leadership and managerial skills that a recent college grad may not possess.

Built-in Tenacity

Graduates from an alternative training program have already proven themselves by finishing the course. Many alternative training programs remove barriers such as high tuition costs. This means that the training becomes accessible to a wider pool of tech-interested people. It also means anyone who joins a program can drop out with fewer financial consequences than they could in a two- or four-year degree program — resulting in individuals who’ve demonstrated immense drive and hard work.

That presents a built-in vetting process. People who successfully complete free or low-cost training programs prove their grit and tenacity — especially considering that many are taking care of children or working full-time on the side. These kinds of traits are important in tech job candidates.

Many of these learners are also career-changers. They left one career to pursue a true interest in technology, which means they’ve demonstrated drive simply by taking the risk to enter a new career field.

Industry-Relevant Skills

Graduates from nontraditional learning pathways are often equipped with specific, industry-relevant skills. Because alternative training programs tend to be more nimble when it comes to curriculum, they can easily adapt to teach the specific skills employers are looking for. Many programs even ask companies what skills they’re in need of — both current and future — to ensure students learn the proper ones.

For example, our organization recently switched the core language taught in our flagship LC101 course, moving from Python to JavaScript after assessing the skills needed by our hiring partners. We’re also able to train a cohort of students specifically for a company experiencing difficulty hiring those hard-to-find skill sets. Given that 33% of companies report problems in finding qualified candidates to fill open tech positions, alternative training programs may be the answer for sourcing talent.

Of course, college graduates with relevant skills should always be a part of the eligible hiring pool. But with the demand for entry-level talent being so much greater than what traditional pathways are producing, it’s time for hiring managers to diversify their recruitment strategies to give other talented technologists a shot. They’re likely to be pleasantly surprised by the talent and promise candidates from a variety of education and experience backgrounds can bring to their businesses.