An undercurrent of resistance simmers among employees, who return to the office after a long period of either working from a remote location or hybrid working. 

The recent rise of phenomena such as moonlighting and quiet quitting in the workplace also shows a drastic shift in employee preferences and engagement. 

How to tackle the problem? Sumit Sabharwal, CEO, TeamLease HRtech offers some insight. He says organisations have the opportunity to ensure that quiet quitting and moonlighting does not hurt them by leveraging technology to gain critical information, get an early indication and avoid this HR crisis.

The phenomena like white-collar lethargy, quiet quitting, and moonlighting have always been there in the workplace but what has changed is how technology can now enable us to understand the various aspects of the employee life cycle.

"There are certain moments in the employee life cycle which are predictable at certain stages, like at the time of onboarding, performance approval, project completion, promotion, changes of the department, or new responsibility. However, in today's world of fast changes, there are many things in the employee life cycle that are not predictable, like something on the personal front, at home, medical emergencies, or financial concerns. And while it cannot be predicted, it does affect the employee's work-life balance," says Sabharwal.

According to him, HRTech cannot only intervene with the kind of pulse surveys or feedback from an employee from a complete work perspective but also with work-life balance or personal perspective, from whatever employees want to share.

The organisation can then understand all that employee is going through and can be aligned in their approach towards that particular employee or that particular department.

He says it may not be possible to understand it for every employee but technology could provide information on the mobile phone or on an app that can help in real-time sentiment analysis of each individual employee so that everyone has a unique or a tailored way of approaching and understanding their needs and how and to what extent organisation can go and fulfill those needs.

How should companies choose the right technology

While companies have adopted certain technologies, are they really impacting the employee experience and engagement?

“These are somethings we need to assess,” feels Sabharwal.

"Most of the technologies may not be able to address the modern-day challenges of the constantly changing environment. For example, in today's world, if an employee needs instant access to money, is your technology solution integrated to provide an instant loan, or is the technology solution integrated with an insurance service provider to give them that kind of coverage of insurance, in addition to the other available benefits, " he adds. 

Technology is also integrated into wearable devices these days and HR tech is making all these wearable devices integrated into the core platforms wherein if you can monitor or know the kind of stress level in an employee, in a particular department, in a particular city, even to that extent that can help, or even something that is changing in his work or overall space otherwise causing an increase in health parameter for the employee. 

"Employers can have a tailored-made intervention that can ease out the entire journey of the employee during that stage of his employee life cycle so that the employee can have a differential employee experience. Otherwise, it's not possible, as we have a limited number of interactions with the employee," says Sabharwal.

Hence, by leveraging technology, these kinds of data can be collected, analysed through an intuitive or AI platform, and then tailor-made employee engagement and a more relevant and effective proposition could be provided for those sets of employees.

Needless to say, when the employee's engagement and experience are better, the retention is much more than in the other case.

A balancing act between human touch and technology

While technology can help with the collection of data, certain data analytics, advanced algorithms, and AI can surely suggest some options which are most relevant for respective interventions, but to make a choice and execute those interventions is certainly what will require complete human intervention, says Sabharwal.

"The effectiveness and impact of human interventions can be increased multifold if the right HR technology is in place to complement that," he adds.

Most exciting work tech

Sabharwal finds wearable devices as one of the most exciting work tech where HR tech can go beyond employee engagement and positively impact the work-life balance for an employee.

"Also, the mobile-first which we are introducing will help us not only allocate work to the employees on the mobile but also to gauge their productivity. People will be able to complete their work on the mobile on the move giving them the flexibility to work from anywhere," he adds. 

How to minimise challenges in the hybrid workplace

There is more interaction and exchange of ideas when a person is working in the office versus virtually, feels Sabharwal. However, with the advent of Metaverse, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), a virtual work environment for employees can be created.

"TeamLease HRtech is working on something similar in their innovation lab. Even though the impact of not working in the office cannot be removed completely, it can be minimised. We are working on a minimal touch solution as far as HR processing is concerned. For example, their applicant tracking systems, which is a talent acquisition platform, is zero touch platform using bots that will trigger the interviews with the potential candidate at a time and on the channel of their preference including any of the social media platforms, like WhatsApp, or any other one-on-one chat channels," he informs. 

"The assessments and the entire shortlisting to onboarding process is seamless with zero touch and zero intervention from any of the recruiters," he sums up.