Forrester defines the digital employee experience as “the sum of all of the perceptions employees have working with all technology they use to complete their daily work and manage their relationship with their employer across the life cycle of their employment.”
Those experiences were of utmost importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many organizations transitioned to full-time remote work. And the digital employee experience is just as critical today, as remote work remains the norm for a large share of businesses.
A Forrester survey of more than 3,600 business and technology professionals whose organization transitioned to at least some level of full-time remote work during the pandemic showed that 62% anticipated a higher permanent work-from-home rate. In the oil and gas, high-tech products, financial services and retail industries, at least 65% of the respondents expect the higher level of remote work to be permanent.
Why content is key to the digital employee experience
In a webinar hosted by Hyland, the guest speaker, Forrester Principal Analyst Cheryl McKinnon, said modern workplaces must put the digital employee experience at the center of their efforts.
Content is a foundational component of the experience. Employees need access to information to do their jobs. They need to document their work and collaborate with peers.
HR teams require tools that allow employees to track pay, time off and benefits, and explore career and learning development opportunities. Workers also need access to digital communications, rewards and recognition programs, and the chance to provide feedback in company surveys.
For front-line workers, especially in healthcare, a mobile strategy is essential. Employees in customer service roles need a simple, fast method of accessing information.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all experience,” McKinnon said. “(When) we think about the digital workplace of today, we do need those abilities to tailor and deliver those more individualized or personalized, role-specific workplace experiences.”
How a content management platform can empower a workforce
The power of a content management platform can be measured by the value of the applications it delivers — from employee file management to customer onboarding, accounts payable and loan origination solutions.
“When we think about a modern content platform, we really do look for those technologies that are flexible, that are cloud-friendly, if not cloud-native, and provide those easy templating design and low-code types of tools to help internal IT and development teams deliver those very specific, meaningful apps that business buyers and business leaders need,” McKinnon said.
Content services can serve as the core of a content management platform.
McKinnon divided foundational content services into four categories:
- Collaborative content services (document management and information sharing)
- Transactional content services (process and workflow automation)
- Federation and integration services
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services
The generational war has been won, the Forrester principal analyst said. The shift from “on-premises, monolithic architectures” to flexible cloud platforms is happening now.
A sign that the appetite for content management is healthy: 67% of the respondents to a 2022 Forrester survey of software decision-makers said they planned to increase their spend that year. Another 24% expected to spend the same amount on content management platforms.
The benefits of an effective digital employee experience strategy
Organizations that provide a quality digital employee experience can benefit from productivity gains, streamlined operations and cost savings. Paper waste can be eliminated, and decision-making often is faster and more effective.
Many of those gains are obvious. But something else stands out when organizations empower their workers: They become more engaged.
According to Forrester’s Future Of Work Survey, 94% of highly engaged employees said they have the right technology and equipment to do their job. Only 42% of less engaged employees said the same.
Those are crucial numbers for businesses, as research shows that engaged employees are more likely to be team- and solution-oriented, show a passion for learning and go above and beyond.
Disengaged workers, on the other hand, might feel no real connection to their jobs and are more prone to do the bare minimum.
Digital employee experience trends to watch
Here are a few trends that McKinnon said Forrester is tracking:
- Cross-functional teams: Innovative companies are creating groups of employees from various departments to deliver the best digital experiences for employees.
- Closing information gaps: With members from such departments as IT and internal communications, plus end-user computing specialists and HR leaders, the cross-functional teams are breaking down silos that negatively affect the employee experience.
- Workforce volatility: With corporate downsizing and return-to-office mandates, there’s a struggle to retain talent. That volatility is disruptive to business.
Artificial intelligence tops list of emerging technologies
“The real area of innovation and investment right now is around automation capabilities, largely driven by the new promise of artificial intelligence,” McKinnon said. “AI has been coming into this market for a number of years, helping us with things like grabbing useful data out of static content types, moving into things like automated categorization. Now, we’re really seeing the promise of helping us create content, to summarize it, to transform it from one type to another. I think we’re on the brink of some really interesting and exciting opportunities here.”
Generative AI topped Forrester’s list of emerging technologies for 2023. The research and advisory firm defines generative AI as a “set of technologies and techniques that leverage very large corpuses of data, including large language models like GPT-3, to generate new content.”
As enticing as it might be to spend just a few minutes on a task that used to take hours, there are risks to the technology. AI is “a tool that still needs to be in the hands of the subject matter expert,” McKinnon said.
Forrester lays out some of the risks in its “Four M's” of workplace AI:
- Multiplier: AI generates massive scale improvements measured by orders of magnitude.
- Magic: AI shocks employees with its insights and performance compared with human labor.
- Mistakes: AI causes real harm to customers and processes when used without humans in the loop.
- Mayhem: AI goes outside of its training to generate hallucinations.
AI can be very valuable — Forrester predicts that it will have “direct and measurable business benefits in less than two years” — but it requires strict oversight.
How Hyland can deliver an optimized digital employee experience
OnBase App Builder: Built with HR in mind, this solution offers streamlined views, custom navigation and pages that are tailored to the user. The persona-based apps deliver a self-service experience to employees.
Mobile access: The Hyland mobile app allows employees to search for and upload documents, approve workflow tasks and submit forms from the palm of their hand.
Seamless integration: Hyland has two new integrations with industry-leading ECM systems — Workday Extend and SAP SuccessFactors. With the appropriate access rights, users can directly upload and interact with content that’s securely stored in OnBase, a Hyland content services platform, while still operating from familiar Workday and SAP screens.
Delivering an optimal digital employee experience is paramount. Failure to do so can lead to disengaged employees, which affects productivity and, ultimately, profitability.
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