Is Your Workforce Management Technology User-friendly Enough?

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Your employee experience isn’t defined only by benefit packages and office perks. Communal snacks and ping pong (if you’re extra hip) are fun, but the experience of being an employee is influenced more by the factors that influence their ability to do the work that’s expected.

While communication tools like email are pretty standard everywhere and reflect what employees use at home, other solutions vary greatly in functionality, efficiency and user experience.

A recent survey  by The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated called “Engaging Opportunity” found that nearly half of employees wished their workplace technology performed more like the products and services they use at home. Most do not find workplace technologies to be as user-friendly as they’d like.

If It’s Not Responsive, It’s a Problem.

Since people can accomplish almost anything from their phones outside of work, it’s reasonable to expect the same while on the job. When seemingly simple tasks like checking PTO balances and submitting time-sheets cannot be accessed on-the-go, as needed, then these processes become frustrating for employees.

Because smartphones are so ubiquitous, failure to deliver a basic mobile-friendly solution for key employee services shows a distinct lack of attention or concern for employees’ experience. Solutions don’t have to be as newfangled as an AI assistant or chatbot, but offering basic mobile-responsiveness to key workplace functions is a responsibility employers everywhere can no longer avoid in the minds of their employees.

More Solutions? More Challenges.

It’s common for businesses to rely on multiple technologies for daily operation, but each new standalone solution may add new hurdles for employees to cross.

On the most basic level, the more logins an employee has to remember, the more stressful simple tasks can become — not to mention the productivity lost to navigating various online portals.

Still, switching to a fully centralized workforce management solution isn’t the best course of action for everyone — but greater efficiencies may be found in eliminating redundant services and better integrating the solutions your team trusts most.

Outdated processes and technology affect employees across all industries, but some industries have a worse perception than most. The public sector has an especially large challenge to reform its perception for having sub-par workplace tech. In a Kronos piece for Governing.com, we learned that 55% of state and local employees see their work made more difficult by the outdated technology in use. Still, poor employee experiences are affecting performance, recruitment and retention for businesses across all industries, and business leaders in all sectors should take note.

Now is the perfect time to reevaluate your workplace technologies, starting with integral processes in workforce management. Are your solutions delivering on the basic expectations of both your people on the floor and their administrators? What are the current pain points they face that complicate their workday?

Every shift toward more user-friendly technology, whether it’s a new implementation, an integration or an untapped optimization, will set your workplace on the right path to providing a stronger employee experience.