It’s obvious that every company wants to keep its employees happy. With the current scarcity on the labour market, this is even higher on the list of priorities than ever. Did you know that digital tools also influence the employee satisfaction score?
Higher productivity through process optimization
Many of you will recognize this. A company or department is working with different systems that do not ‘talk’ to each other. As a result, employees repeatedly enter the same data in multiple programs. Or a customer name is written differently in system A than in system B. We often see that someone is looking up a reference in system A, and is then copying it in another system. What if you are the one who has to do this 100 times a day? Not to mention the spreadsheets that need to be created weekly or monthly to consolidate data from different systems.
Automating repetitive tasks and those tasks with little added value of the employee pays off in three areas: higher productivity, less human error, more satisfied and motivated employees. In production environments, it has been known since the rise of ‘Lean’ that continuous improvement based on the input of the team members pays off.
Thoughtful digital transformation pays off
Nowadays, many companies are digitizing their business processes or even undergoing a complete digital transformation. After this intensive process, it is important that the new programs are actually used. However, the opposite is true. New systems are not always used as intended. Employees rather stick to the old way of working (e.g. spreadsheet). Or the system itself is not efficient enough and causes employees to lose even more time than before.
As a result, users quickly become discouraged and feel misunderstood. And management feels frustrated by the low adoption.
It is therefore extremely important to sufficiently involve employees in optimizing digital business processes. Not to give them a false sense of involvement, but to ensure that they too benefit from the new system. This way adoption becomes self-evident.
Focus on the users
In the past, employees or B2B customers were much more likely to accept systems that weren’t user-friendly. Through the digitization of the B2C world, where ease of use and “customer experience” have become more important than product and price, employees have learned that user-friendly systems are indeed possible. They use them daily! Check the efforts banks are making to create apps that simplify their customers’ lives. The question why companies don’t do this for their own employees will soon follow. Investing in good user-friendly systems for the employees in these times of shortage in the labor market will not only ensure more job satisfaction, but, when properly addressed, will also lead to a much better ROI.
