Companies are starting to see the value of using data to improve the employee experience, boosting productivity and job satisfaction.

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Labor shortages and mass resignations have become the defining characteristic of the post-pandemic era. Leaders across industries and sectors are scrambling to keep employees engaged and satisfied, whether physically present in the office or clocking in remotely from anywhere on the planet.

However, some organizations are more exposed to high employee turnover than others. Large enterprises with outdated human capital management (HCM) systems and complex applicant tracking systems (ATSs) are having trouble recruiting top talent. Those same enterprises often have trouble retaining top-performing employees as well. 

As a result, many enterprise leaders are starting to look for points of friction in the employee experience and resolve them to keep their teams happy, engaged and healthy. Employee experience platforms have emerged in this new era of employee experience to meet this need by combining employee tracking tool functionality with data analytics to drive insight.

What is an Employee Experience Platform?

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Employee experience platforms are technological solutions that drive company-wide initiatives to keep employees productive, healthy, and engaged with their work. They do this by gathering and reporting behavioral data on how employees interact with the organization across multiple channels and platforms.

An employee experience platform may help you identify and resolve a wide range of issues. Some common examples include:

• Helping HR teams attract and retain top talent by streamlining the hiring and onboarding process.
• Ensuring top-performing employees stay focused by showing what kinds of tasks they excel at most.
• Establishing reasonable productivity standards based on real-time feedback from employees while they work.
• Simplifying time-consuming administrative processes like payroll reporting.

If employees experience friction when trying to do regular parts of their job, it impacts team productivity and morale. While a single obstacle is rarely severe enough to directly lead to resignations, employee experience pain points have a tendency of adding up. 

Without clear visibility into the experiences that employees have while working, HR professionals can’t easily tell when employees are reaching that critical threshold. As a result, managers and executives are blindsided when multiple employees hand in their resignations at once.

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Employee Experience Platforms Provide Data-Driven Visibility

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Human resources professionals are racing to modernize their systems and improve service delivery through digital transformation. In order to stay competitive, they need to be able to quickly onboard new employees and retain existing ones by identifying and addressing pain points in the employee experience.

Traditional enterprise HR tools don’t provide clear visibility into employee experience dynamics in this way. The usual HCM and ATS deployments aren’t enough to drive insight into the employee experience itself. For this, teams need to integrate software for employee monitoring alongside online employee time tracking tools.

Integrating these systems together gives HR teams the tools they need to start identifying aspects of the employee experience that need work. By implementing a policy to monitor PC activity for productivity data, HR departments can gain data-driven insight into the types of work employees do best – and see where they fall behind.

Employee performance tracking software enables this kind of insight when combined with productivity output reports. With the appropriate data visualization tools, you can immediately see where performance drops off and why. When done right, you might catch and resolve employee experience issues before they grow into problems.

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Employee Experience Platforms Aren’t Just for Onboarding

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Many enterprises use employee experience platforms to gather and analyze data on new hires, hoping to streamline the onboarding process and prevent fast employee turnover rates. This approach is undoubtedly useful, but it comes up short of what you can achieve when you monitor PC activity to gain insight into the employee experience.

This is because the employee experience doesn’t stop after onboarding. In fact, by that point the employee experience hasn’t even yet properly begun. Yet many companies simply stop collecting data on the employee experience after this moment. 

Organizations that implement analytics software for employee monitoring to streamline every aspect of the employee experience are able to improve engagement and productivity through the entire employee lifecycle. They can identify and leverage talent management opportunities throughout each stage of that process.

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Integrate Every Aspect of the Employee Experience

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An  integrated employee experience platform can offer greater insight into the data you get from almost every employee-facing technology your company uses. For example, most organizations use a time clock app for employees, but relatively few approach time clock data from an integrated employee experience perspective.

By matching time clock data with the specific applications that employees use during the course of their workday, you can easily identify productivity bottlenecks and employee experience pain points that may otherwise go unreported. 

If you gather employee productivity data on an individual basis, you can monitor PC activity to find out which projects and workflows suit certain employees best. When you have complex, high-impact projects that require the attention of your best performers, you’ll already know who to assign for the job.

This approach doesn’t just help your company  become more efficient and profitable. It also enables employees to make the most of the time they spend working. It helps them spend more time doing what they do best, and earning satisfying rewards for the work they do.

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Create a Positive Work Experience for Employees

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According to IBM’s Smarter Workforce Institute, employees who report a positive work experience are three times less likely to leave the organization than those who don’t. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, but it underscores the importance of investing in the employee experience as part of your employee retention program.

Recruiting, training, and onboarding new employees is far more expensive than investing in initiatives that improve retention by optimizing the employee experience. Organizations that take the time to manage that experience will be better-suited to face today’s labor-starved market and all the challenges it brings.