The Digital Transformation of Employee Engagement: How Tech is Leading the Way
Publié le 24 October 2023
Make sure that your organization uses the latest trends to create a positive experience by understanding the digital transformation of employee engagement.
So, what’s the greatest modern workplace paradox?
While the ongoing wave of digital transformation is helping companies adapt to remote and hybrid working arrangements, this trend also has the possibility of reducing employee engagement, experience, and happiness within your organization.
The continuous pings on Slack, non-stop Zoom calls, and monotonous email communication leave employees less excited about their daily work schedule – as a result, they become more disengaged and disconnected.
What most companies fail to see is the importance of the “human element” in digital transformation.
Employees are likely to feel more engaged and excited once they know what you’re trying to achieve with your digital transformation initiatives.
So, let’s dive in to know more about why employee engagement is important for digital transformation, explore the potential challenges you might face during the digital adoption, and discover some must-have tools in your digital tech stack.
Why is employee engagement important for digital transformation?
When you talk about digital adoption, you primarily refer to the automation of your business processes and operations, the use of digital tools in the workplace, and the acceptance of new business models.
But, at the heart of all of this lies your employees. Why?
Your employees go through the entire digital transformation journey, putting employee engagement and experience in the driving seat.
For instance, when a company embraces employee management software to create 24 hour shift patterns for teams, track work hours, and communicate in the workplace, it drastically changes the employee’s roles and responsibilities and the way the company operates and manages its workforce.
Companies that fail to engage line managers and frontline employees witness a digital transformation success rate of just 3% compared to the 26% and 28% success rate of companies that involve.
Irrespective of whether you use the latest tools and technologies, your investments will go down the drain if your employees show reluctance and resistance to embrace this change.
Benefits of Digital transformation for Employee Engagement
Companies implementing this digital adoption in the right way witness numerous benefits in the workplace:
- Improved Communication and Collaboration: Digital tools empower your employees to share files, send messages, schedule conference calls, and conduct video chats to foster a communication culture. Building a culture of regular communication can reduce workplace inefficiencies, resulting in more engaged and happy employees.
- Greater Productivity and Efficiency: With digital tools working in the background, your employees can now focus on high-value work, helping them manage and use resources to the best of their potential. For instance, your employees can use AI chatbots to answer their general Human resources (HR) related queries, allowing the HR team to focus on other important issues.
- Improved Employee Experiences: Companies having the right tools in their arsenal are more adept at engaging and retaining top talent. For instance, using digital tools for communication can ensure that all your employees from the upper to the lower management communicate and connect with each other.
Challenges of Improving Employee Engagement in Digital Transformation
For most companies, the journey of bringing a paradigm shift in digital adoption isn’t a cakewalk, especially when you’re prioritizing employee engagement. Here are some challenges you’re likely to incur during this journey:
- User Adoption Challenges
One of the primary bottlenecks faced in adopting digital technologies and tools is the Generations X, for whom digital adoption is still a buzzword. Interestingly, this resistance can also result from the fear of the unknown and apprehension about losing a job because of technological advancement.
Gen Z and Millennials may show resistance if they don’t see the immediate value of the new technology, making your digital transformation journey tougher.
With 70% of digital adoption failing because of employee resistance, user adoption can be your most pressing challenge in this digital adoption journey.
Solution: Create a digital change management strategy clearly outlining the purpose of the change, the role employees will play in this transition, and how you will help employees in digital adoption.
- Training challenge
Even the most revolutionary software with excellent user design and interface may fail. Why?
The reason is that most companies, even today, follow the classroom and conventional teaching approach of software training. These conventional employee training methods have a lower retention rate, resulting in lower digital adoption rate among your employees.
With only 56% of companies training their employees on using new tools and technologies, the need of the hour is making software adoption a seamless process.
Solution: Ensure that new software training happens in real-time, ensuring employees receive hands-on experience working with the tool.
- Leadership and change management challenge
When business leaders lack knowledge about your company’s digital adoption vision, they isolate or withdraw themselves from these initiatives. As a result, digital adoption becomes a looming threat because your employees look to their leaders to embrace such technological changes.
Solution: Ensure leaders are aware about the steps you take to embrace this digital change.
Digital Tools to Enhance Digital Transformation & Employee Engagement
Whether you run a physical store with the help of wholesalers or an online business stocked by dropshipping suppliers – any business can take advantage of today’s high-tech strategies for improving employee engagement. Leveraging the right digital tools can help you build and grow your business while keeping your employees engaged and productive in this dynamic era.
Here are some digital tools for enhancing employee engagement and digital adoption:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools
Artificial Intelligence can improve your employee productivity and ensure you meet your onsite and remote employees’ requirements. Here are some revolutionary AI tools to consider:
Chatbots and virtual assistants
Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide support by answering your employee queries and providing ongoing training and guidance.
These chatbots can answer HR queries related to workplace policies or vacations, and automate basic administrative tasks, such as scheduling meetings.
Tools to use: Workday Assistant and IBM watsonx Assistant
Gamification
Gamification is an AI tool using game-like elements such as rewards, healthy competition, and achievement to non-gaming elements. Gamified AI apps empower your employees to train, create volunteer initiatives and vote on various work and engagement opportunities.
With leaderboards, scorecards, and challenges, employees remain motivated to excel and be an active part of the company-led engagement initiatives.
Tools to use: Spinify, Bunchball, and TalentCards
- Employee engagement tools
Employee engagement tools give you an overview of your employee satisfaction and engagement level. Through employee surveys and feedback channels, these tools collect valuable employee feedback, provide a platform for sharing your company’s latest news and updates, and foster a culture of peer recognition using recognition boards.
Their social features make employers feel connected with your company because the tool allows continuous interaction and collaboration among employees. These tools foster a positive workplace culture, enhance workplace productivity, and increase employee retention rates.
Tools to use: Terryberry, Nectar, and Motivosity
- Tools for efficiency
The right digital tools can leave a lasting impact on your company’s efficiency and employee productivity. Embracing these efficiency tools helps in project completion and ensures your employees are clear about their roles and duties. These tools for efficiency are your one-stop destination for ensuring an engaged workforce:
- Task management tools: Tools like Airtable and ProofHub can help your employees visualize their workload, keep track of their work progress, and complete projects within the stipulated time.
- Document management tools: Tools like Monday.com and Confluence help employees organize their files. These tools enable your company to share, collaborate, and organize multiple file types under one roof. From HR forms to project proposals, these tools provide instant access to any document within the blink of an eye.
- Automated reporting tools: Tools like Google Analytics and SolveXia eliminate the manual process of preparing data and creating reports. Instead of spending days together to collect, organize, and structure the information, these automated systems pull data in real-time, helping teams to focus on the most important task – analysis.
- Tools for enhancing communication
Enhancing communication with your company fosters collaboration, improves productivity, and ensures employee engagement.
As a result, most companies turn to tools like video-to-text convertors. These tools transcribe video messages from leaders and stakeholders to make the content accessible to everyone in the company.
In addition, if your company operates in multiple countries with diverse languages, you can use these tools to translate video to English to ensure all employees can access your content, resulting in broader reach.
What’s more interesting is you can use this translated and transcribed content to create a searchable knowledge base. Your employees can search for the information in a giffy – increasing employee engagement.
Tools to use: Happy Scribe, GoTranscribe, Otter
- Tools for workplace flexibility
If modern-day companies truly want to increase employee experience and enhance workplace retention, providing a hybrid work environment is the least they can do. Providing this flexibility is one of the most sought-after digital transformation strategies for increasing employee experience. Here are the tools making this dream come true:
- Remote access control: Employees can securely access their work desktops from anywhere with remote access control tools like Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) or VPN. These portals boast of superior protection, security, and privacy of intranet resources.
- Virtual office platforms: Virtual office platforms map the amazing things of an onsite job into the online world. From video conferencing and time-tracking to screen sharing and team collaboration, these tools ensure a seamless remote work experience. By simulating a physical office in real-time, these platforms increase employee satisfaction and foster a positive experience.
Transforming Employee Engagement in the Digital Age
Digital transformation and employee engagement are the two sides of the same coin because when employees have the right tools in their arsenal, it increases the employee experience. And this positive experience ensures they welcome every new digital transformation initiative with an open mind.
For forward-thinking companies, digital adoption is no longer an option: it’s a necessity.
As companies are fastening their seat belts to jump on this transformation bandwagon, it has become increasingly important to choose digital tools that positively impact the company while elevating the employee experience.
It’s probably the right time for companies to focus on employee-first approach even when making a minute change in the digital landscape.
Following the employee-first approach religiously can open doors to profits, revenue, and tons of opportunities.
