What is an Employee Experience Platform? The Ultimate Guide

Employee engagement levels are still low which is the consequence of poor employee experience in the workplace. The way employees work today is much different than 2 years ago, but employers are still struggling to adjust to new working trends.

This is why the demand for employee experience platforms is at its peak. Employers now understand the power of technology in improving the workplace experience.

In this blog, we will explain what employee experience platforms are and why it is important to implement an EX platform in your organization.

📚Before we dive in, take a look at our ebook “How to Boost Employee engagement with Communications Tools”

What is an Employee Experience Platform

Employee experience is the most popular topic among HR professionals today. Voluntary employee turnover rates are higher than ever before. People are faced with increased levels of stress caused by the current pandemic.

EX platforms aim to improve employee experience in the workplace. They are designed to assess and improve various employee touchpoints throughout their career journeys.

That being said, there are various types of employee experience platforms and there is no single solution that touches every single part of the employee journey.

HR professionals are mostly looking into new HR tech solutions to improve user experience and replace old, outdated workplace technology. However, many are still not achieving this primary goal.

In his study, Josh Bersin found that while 59% of companies expected their new workplace platform to be easier to use, only 35% actually achieved that benefit.

💡 Related: 14 Hacks to Stop Employees From Leaving

8 Reasons to Implement an EX Platform

With remote and hybrid work models becoming the norm for many organizations, employers are now looking into ways to improve digital employee experience and better support employees with the right technology.

Furthermore, many companies are also investing in new solutions to help their frontline workers improve communication and collaboration with their peers and managers.

Let’s take a deep dive into some of the reasons why employee experience platforms should be a part of every organization’s tech stack.

🎧 Also, tune in to our podcast to learn about the biggest challenges of hybrid work.

Increase employee engagement and improve organizational alignment

According to the latest Gallup report, 36% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, while 13% are actively disengaged (actively disengaged workers are “those who have miserable work experiences and spread their unhappiness to their colleagues”) .

Poor internal communications are often the main reasons for such low engagement rates.

Today, when distributed workplaces are on the rise, many employees feel isolated as there is a lack of in-person communications. As a consequence, employee morale drops and workers become disengaged.

Modern employee experience platforms are designed to make people more engaged in the workplace. They enable companies to drive organizational alignment and make people more connected.

The internal communications agency H&H found that only 40% of IC professionals believe that employees understand “well” or “very well” the contribution they’re making to the business, and 72% of employees don’t have a full understanding of their company’s strategy.

When employees don’t understand their contributions to the business and when they don’t know what their company stands for, there is a lack of motivation and work satisfaction.

EX platforms and other employee apps help organizations improve the flow of information in the workplace and make sure that the right message reaches the right employees at the right time. The best solutions offer robust audience segmentation features so that employers can deliver content that is relevant to their employees. Consequently, this allows employees get more engaged with internal content, which helps them become more aligned with the company’s mission, vision, strategy, and core company values.

💡 Also check out our ultimate employee experience guide and how to create a perfect employee experience strategy for your organization.

Improve cross-functional and team collaboration

Cross-functional and team collaboration in the workplace is more important than ever. Hybrid and remote work make it harder for employees to stay connected and collaborate effectively.

🗺️ Below is a great representation of the most common team collaboration challenges organizations are facing around the world.

Employee experience platforms with robust segmentation features enable organizations to create private or public channels which teams and departments can use to easily connect with anyone in the company and collaborate more efficiently.

Because of the lack of proper workplace technology, many employees today rely on their personal smartphones to reach their peers and collaborate efficiently.

According to research, 53% of frontline workers use messaging apps such as WhatsApp up to six times a day for workplace communication. At the same time, 16% of workers said their HR departments are unaware of this.

Because such apps are not built with data privacy in mind, many companies are now looking for ISO and GDPR certified employee experience apps with chat functionalities, ensuring that confidential information is always protected.

Enable frontline workers for success and keep them safe

Over 83% of frontline workers don’t even have a corporate email address, and 45% don’t have access to their company intranet when at work. During the pandemic, these employees have been exposed to health-related risks more than deskbound workers.

Workplace accidents and illnesses happen because organizations don’t have proper communication ecosystems designed to reach their frontline workers in a timely manner. Mobile-first employee experience platforms like Haiilo enable frontline workers to access important company updates in seconds even if they don’t have a corporate email.

Push notifications enable employers and managers to target the right audience and get frontline workers’ attention on important announcements, making sure that they never miss important information.

Drive employees’ share of voice

Employees want to be heard. Yet, one-way communications are still present in some organizations. Employers send mass newsletters to the entire workplace, and employees don’t have a way to provide their feedback, ask questions, and raise concerns.

According to research, only a quarter of employees feel like they can freely express themselves at work. They report that they often choose not to speak up at work, even though they have something they would like to say.

Employee experience platforms like Haiilo are designed to drive open and honest workplace communications where every employee can speak up. These tools not only support two-way communications but also offer employee surveys for organizations to quickly and efficiently collect feedback from their employees.

Eliminate information overload

Information overload is one of the most common productivity killers in the workplace. It costs the US economy a minimum of $900 billion per year in lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation, according to recent research by Basex.

These stats are even more shocking and alarming:

• 25% of workers experienced significant stress and poor health due to the volume of information they’re required to process.
• 36% of managers reported poor health due to the excessive information they were required to process in the workplace.
• 68% of those managers felt that information overload has had a negative impact on their personal and professional relationships.

Advanced employee experience platforms with robust filters and segmentation features make it easier to distribute more personalized content based on employees’ nature of work, geo-location, language, job title, department, interests, and many more.

Employees get personalized news feeds with relevant information in their channel of choice, eliminating information overload and making employees more productive.

Improve digital employee experience by integrating various tools

Take, for example, marketing, sales, and development teams within your organization. All of them use a variety of internal communication as well as other tools on a daily basis to get work done.

Some use Slack, some Microsoft Teams, some may use Yammer or Workplace from Facebook.

While it makes sense for each department to use the best-of-breed technology for their core functions, it also makes it harder for HR and communications departments to reach employees.

These complex communications ecosystems in the workplace also create frustrations among employees as finding relevant information becomes mission impossible.

Haiilo’s Content Booster helps employers reach employees through whichever channel they prefer, ensuring that important information never gets lost. It provides a central place for employees from various departments to always stay up-to-date with everything that is going on in the organization.

Boost employee advocacy

Employees with better working experience are much more likely to be brand ambassadors. According to Entrepreneur, social media content shared by employees gets 8 times more engagement than content shared through the brand’s own social channels and is shared 25 times more frequently.

For these reasons, every organization can benefit from having brand advocates. Many of them are, however, struggling to implement ambassadorship programs attractive to employees.

Employee experience platforms with advocacy features make brand advocacy fun, easy, and motivating for employees.

Integration with all major social networks makes it easy to share content with a single click, and it extends the reach beyond just LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Gamification and recognition functionalities significantly increase user adoption while making employees more motivated to participate in the ambassadorship programs. Employees can collect points or be featured on the company’s leaderboards which makes the program more fun and engaging.

Improve people analytics

Bersin’s research points out that only 2% of HR organizations have mature people analytics competence to bank on. There is thus quite a heavy first-mover advantage for innovative, intelligent organizations that are trying to tap into this space.

One of the most in-demand features in employee experience platforms is detailed people analytics. Organizations are becoming more and more data-driven, and they want to better measure their employees’ experience in the workplace.

Sophisticated EX platforms make better sense of seemingly unrelated data streams and find meaning, correlation, and interdependence between one or more factors to predict and manage work better.

Using employee surveys, organizations can quickly collect and analyze data gathered directly from their employees, while engagement analytics provide a real-time overview of employees’ engagement with important internal campaigns.

Haiilo’s A.I.-powered analytics also provide actionable recommendations on how to improve current workplace communications as well as what types of content to produce to keep employees engaged.

💡 Check out our 13 tips for improving employee experience!

The EX Platform Category Explained

Employee experience platform is an emerging and fast growing HR tech category. As explained by Josh Bersin,

“Despite billions of dollars now invested in new cloud-based Human Capital Management Systems, research now shows that the HR tech market is actually getting messier… we found that while 59% of companies expected their new platform to be easier to use, only 35% actually achieved that benefit.”

In the sea of various solutions, employers often get confused about which features and functionalities they need to improve their employees’ satisfaction, engagement, and productivity. Since EX has become one of the most popular topics in HR, many HR tech companies want to be listed under this category.

But are they really true employee experience platforms? Or do they just provide a portion of the features for employee feedback, employee recognition, or employee wellbeing?

fLet’s take a look into some of the must-have functionalities to look for when choosing the right solution.

Employee Experience Platform: Must-Have Features

Choosing the right internal communication tools, employee experience platforms, and employee engagement apps for your organization is not easy. There are plenty of new features and functionalities coming out every day. However, there are certain capabilities you should always be looking for:

• Robust segmentation that enables targeted communications based on employees’ job functions, locations, spoken languages, and their interests
• Chat and document sharing functionalities to boost collaboration
• Mobile-first interface to ensure the best digital employee experience and to better support frontline workers
• Active directory integration and access without email address to make the app accessible for deskless workers
• Easy-to-use surveys and polls to help managers and HR professionals gather continuous employee feedback
• Instant and personalized push notifications to alert employees about emergencies and data that provides insights about message readership
• Seamless integrations with other internal systems to ensure employees can access all the important information through their app
• Employee advocacy and gamification functionalities that make ambassadorship programs fun, engaging, and easy for employees
• Advanced AI-powered analytics and actionable recommendations about how to improve workplace communications efforts

The Haiilo employee experience solution ticks all the boxes above!
Schedule a 15-minute intro call with our team to discuss your business goals, technology requirements and Haiilo pricing for your unique case!